


Mine and Apart

by objectlesson



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Character Study, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, M/M, POV Alternating, Post-Canon, Romance, Sexual Tension, Slow Build, Slow Burn, like seriously the tensest slowest burn of all time
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-09
Updated: 2017-01-06
Packaged: 2018-06-07 08:15:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 50,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6796336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's an art just to give</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So I know it seems like I took a break but I have actually been diligently writing this long, long, slow-build and I've finally got enough of it that I can start posting!I'm pretty excited about it and it's been an absolute blast to write, so I hope you all enjoy it. 
> 
> It definitely features the movie characters, but the universe might be the tiniest bit influenced by the show…they're dealing with THRUSH agents, for example, and the missions feel poorly-plotted and spy-fi esque in a way that's very much like the series. That being said, if you've only seen the movie I strongly doubt it will affect your ability to read and enjoy this, as its mostly focused on characterization and not very plot driven at all. 
> 
> I suspect the completed story will be between 60k and 70k, and it currently a little over 50k and still going strong, so get excited to strap in for a long tide. Both the title and summary are from the Erasure song No Doubt. Thanks for reading!!!

You don’t think much about finding Napoleon Solo attractive, not at first. Of course he’s attractive; it’s his job. He’s all clean lines and symmetry, broad shoulders and eyes like ice. The kind of fine, chiseled face you’ve seen in American menswear magazines, though rarely in person. 

He’s attractive in the way show horses are: preened, expensive, shining like copper pennies and obsidian in the sunlight. You think it says nothing unusual about you to notice such a thing about him. 

After Rome, there’s Istanbul. It’s terrifically hot, and you spend nearly the whole mission sweating in rivulets beneath your sweaters or sticking to the sheets as you try in vain to sleep while Gaby and Napoleon drink raki and sing themselves hoarse to Sinatra. You would be annoyed at them, but the heat drains you to the point where you can’t even muster up a mild irritation. Plus, there’s a strange comfort in hearing them through the wall. Napoleon’s off-tune falsetto and Gaby’s snorting laughter, and for the first time in your life, you are something other than alone. 

One night, you are posing as dining staff at the hotel restaurant, and the stolen uniform you must wear is too tight in the shoulders, sticking to your skin as you stand by the buffet, tight jawed and burning up. You are watching Napoleon Solo be professionally attractive, and even though you no longer want to kill this man, there’s still a nearly unbearable itch to your fists as you look at him. 

It’s a compulsive desire to push, bend, break. Reach for his collar and twist it until it wrinkles, make a first in his hair, clip him in the jaw so that he is swollen, off center. Even if you were dressed in the season’s finest, you never look like he does. You have a scar on your brow and a clench to your teeth, and no matter how thoroughly you clean the blood and filth from beneath your nails, you will always see a killer when you catch sight of your reflection in a mirror. 

It’s not something that bothers you about yourself; you are only bothered by its absence in him. You want to know whenever you look at him that he is a killer just like you, no matter how put together he seems, no matter the oil in his hair, the smell of his aftershave, the stupid manicured smoothness of his palms. You make certain you always know this by studying him when you are out together, and finding and cataloguing his every imperfection, each moment you catch sight of a seam. 

You notice the way Napoleon’s hair comes undone and curls in the humidity; you notice the way his muscles move under the wet cotton of his shirt as he takes his jacket off, the perspiration stains in the underarms. He is flawed, but even like this, he still looks photo-ready, infuriatingly charming as he dabs beads of sweat from a flushed temple with the cuff of his sleeve, other arm hooked neatly through the elbow of the Turkish pop singer he’s been assigned to get close to. She bats her jeweled lashes, and he presses a kiss beneath her ear, catching your eyes over her shoulder as you stand beside the buffet, very upright, very hot.

You glare at him, again thinking of show horses, thinking that it’s quite unnecessary for him to make sure someone sees what a good job he is doing prancing around in the ring, glistening in a sheen of sweat. You look away, sick of Istanbul, sick of the heat. 

\---

The second you see him, you instantly, consciously want him. He is the exact type of thing you covet: rare, challenging, beautiful, sullen, hard to read. You like your art complex, and you seek out men who can hurt you, were you to ever give them the chance to. 

You stare at the terrible fists clenched vice-tight on stolen metal and think effortlessly of an animal, a plow horse, perhaps, all muscle and power, attempting to stop _your car_ with his _bare hands_. 

You want to see him up close. You want to hold his chin between your thumb and forefinger and turn him right and left, see if his eyes are really that terribly blue, or if it’s an illusion created by tail lights and shadow. You want to present him with a variety of items of varying sizes and weights, and watch him pitch them one by one into the ocean as if they were made from balled tissue paper. An anvil. A dumpster. A dead body. So many things for this plow horse to pull for you. 

When he shows up again, you are delighted, even as he tries to snap your neck. His eyes are as blue as they were last night, perhaps even bluer. He moves you around with those car-killing hands, fights you as you have never been fought before, and it’s infuriating, really, but it’s also incredible, to be overpowered so easily, when you are quite used to being the one who breaks bones. _Wow_ , you think more than once, your vision flickering over with stars as he cuts off your air, and _wow_ is something you think very infrequently. You are not easily impressed, but from the very beginning, Illya Kuryakin impresses you. 

You learn he is not a plow horse. He is one of those horses that’s fucked up in the head, a hair-trigger away from bucking you off and tearing away into the brush, wild and ornery and barely broken. You don’t know very much about horses, but you do know that the one time the CIA sent you away to a border town dude ranch so that you could infiltrate a narcotics trafficking ring in New Mexico, you always wanted to ride those half-crazy horses. The stallions who showed the whites of their eyes when you fired gunshots, the ones tho pulled fruitlessly at their halters until the ropes were stained with blood, screaming in horrible wails. You could not ride, not well, anyway, and you hated the way it made your knees ache, but you still wanted to ride those horses. _I could do it_ , you would think, miserably lying on your knapsack as the fire died and stars multiplied overhead, wishing desperately you could take a shower. _I could. And if I couldn't, what a game to try._

You like playing games purely for the fun of playing them. Or at least you think you enjoy the game as much as you enjoy winning. You’re not sure, since you nearly always win. 

Illya is a glorious game to play. He is no fun at all, and that in and of itself is a tremendous wealth of fun. You want him and you want him and you want him, want _anything_ and everything from him. You want him to hate you, to hit you, to want you back. You don’t think often of what it would be like to fuck him, at least not on your first mission together, but you know distantly that if he were to ever put you up against a wall or shove you to your knees, you wouldn’t say no. 

You simply want to break him, to ride him. Or at least, try and incidentally fall bruised to the earth to watch him run away, hooves flashing and skin rippling while you lay in the dust, bemused, thinking _wow_. 

Sensation, sometimes, is enough to sate your curiosity. 

\----

Napoleon is a better shot than you are. _You don’t waste much time practicing marksmanship, Peril. Is it because you prefer to take down men with your bare hands_? is one of his favorite insults to create variations on. It doesn’t bother you because you think guns are irritatingly Western, just like him, and it’s easy for you to dismiss them. They’re efficient if you’re the type of agent who likes to save time and cut corners, but there is something infinitely more satisfying in using one’s own body to ensure you did the job right. Guns are impersonal, messy, expensive. They break easily and look better than they actually are beneath the sheen of grease, somewhat like you imagine Napoleon Solo to be, stripped of all his decorum. 

_You always hide behind gun_ , you tell him. _Are you afraid to use your hands? Worried you might get tear in your suit?_

Napoleon looks at you with wide eyes, feigning an expression of nonplussed offense. _Me? Afraid of men beneath my bare hands? Peril, are you familiar with the common psychological phenomenon known as ‘transference’?_

You are not, but you recognize what he is trying to do. Napoleon is always attempting to twist things so that they reflect back on you, suggesting that he _knows_ you better than you know yourself somehow. He acts as if there are layers of self-deception you are hiding behind, and that he is clever enough to strip them away and find what is inside. You know he’s bluffing because there is nothing inside. It is how you are, and it is a better way. Only a gun-loving American capitalist like Napoleon would delude himself into believing all humans possessed some unique individuality, like a seed hidden beneath layers of soil. 

\---

Illya is like a wind-up toy, at first. Twist the crank until he’s so tight he can barely move, then watch him go. You are fascinated by it; you think you could watch Illya barrel and billow and break things forever. However, after Istanbul, where the still-antagonistic camaraderie between you slowly evolves into something almost like genuine loyalty, you begin to notice that Illya grows resilient to your attempts to ruffle him, fluster him. While you are constantly looking for buttons to push, you can tell Illya is _watching you do it_ , catching you in the act, smirking at you like you are so very transparent. 

It irritates you, but it also twists a hook deep into your gut and pulls sharply south, sparking a flickering heat in its wake.You want to bite that smirk off of Illya’s mouth, you want to taste the last remnants of complacency in his spit before you chase all of his smugness away with something he surely wasn’t expecting.

It becomes more difficult for you to push Illya to a breaking point, which of course, only makes you want to push harder, deeper. It’s not enough that you can make Illya _hate_ you, you want Illya to have every reason to hate you but find himself _unable_ to.

You are aware it’s a dangerous and perhaps a telling thing to want from someone, and you’re not entirely comfortable with it. However, you have never been the sort of man who was deterred away from an intriguing situation by something as banal as _discomfort_ , so you will stay and continue to dig at the wound, wondering what exactly it means that Illya’s hatred is not enough. 

\---

The supposedly abandoned warehouse in Singapore you and Napoleon are assigned to check out is, somewhat predictably, not abandoned. There are a number of metal vats lined up against a corrugated tin wall bearing one of T.H.R.U.S.H.’s lesser-known emblems, and the air smells sharp and chemical, so much so your eyes sting, your lungs feel tight. 

You are testing the surface areas of the vats for radiation when you hear voices echoing in the distance, following the telltale click and creak of a door. Flashlight beams then cut through the black, illuminating the damp concrete ground in strips. 

You meet Napoleon’s eyes, a flash of brilliant blue in darkness, and together you press up against the wall. Cold metal ribbing bites into your back and alongside him, you fall into shadow. 

Craning your neck, you spot one man, then another. “There are only two,” you murmur in a hush. 

“Teenagers taking a moonlight stroll or T.H.R.U.S.H. agents?” Napoleon hisses. You are very aware of his body so close to yours, the weight of his shoulder leaning into you as he lengthens himself along the wall to escape the crawl of light. 

As it disappears, you exhale quietly. “T.H.R.U.S.H.,” you breathe. 

A line cuts through Napoleon’s brow, and you watch his pale hand disappear into his holster, from which he silently pulls his gun. In Rome, you would have protested. In Istanbul, you would have at least rolled your eyes. But now, it is something you have come to expect from him, even respect. He shoots first and asks questions later, and as much as it pains you to admit, this method has saved the mission, not to mention your own life, on more than one occasion. You say nothing as Napoleon Solo peels himself off the wall and sidles out in front of you, close enough you can feel his breath on the tight line of your jaw as he bares his teeth and raises an arm to shoot. 

He wavers like a flame, aiming carefully with one eye screwed shut and the other peering ahead of him. You think nothing of it as your hand unclenches from a fist to touch him, unfurling so that it can rest on the tuck of his ribcage where it gives into the curve of his lower back. Perhaps you are steadying him, perhaps you are steadying yourself. You don’t know until you can feel the heat of his flesh under your palm and are suddenly stunned to realize he did not put himself into your hands; you reached for him. 

He acts like he does not notice. Perhaps he doesn’t, perhaps idle touch is normal enough to be dismissed by him. Your fingers flex involuntarily; you would pull away now, but you don’t want to ruin his shot. You realize with an unmistakable surge of confusion that if it had been Gaby in front of you like this, you would have stopped yourself from touching her in the first place. It is always like that with Gaby, you stay silent and stoic and stationary as she inches ever closer, making you wonder what it is she wants, what she will take, if she wants anything at all beyond your capable resistance. She is, like Napoleon, undeniably beautiful, and you do, on some level, love her. If she kissed you, you might let her, just to see what would happen, where she would take it, which one of you would begin laughing first and cave to this game of chicken you have been playing. 

Here, with your hand on Napoleon’s waist, you realize that you have no authentic or reflexive urge to touch Gaby. You are not magnetized to her flesh, you do not always know where she is in the room as if you were something helpless caught up in her orbit. You do, however, know where Napoleon Solo is in relation to your own body at any given moment. Even if you cannot see him, you know he is there. 

Your cheeks grow very hot very suddenly, and Napoleon takes his shot. It ricochets across the warehouse, making your ears ring, and he curses and fires twice more, chest brushing up against yours as he leans forward on the balls of his feet. Following the deafening ring of gunshots, you hear a muted yell, and two bodies hit the floor. “Done. Let’s move,” he breathes, falling away from your still braced hand. 

Fingers burning as if you have touched fire, you try to make sense of what has just happened. It’s easy to chalk it up to adrenaline, to the base, fleeting desire to ground oneself against human skin in moments of imminent danger. You make yourself forget about it, until it happens again. 

This time, you are in a hospital, stealing the coroner’s report concerning an autopsy for what most certainly is a wrongful death caused by whatever is in those vats. Something trips security, and the lights flicker on just as Napoleon is replacing the papers crisply into their files. You slam side by side up against the wall as two guards race down the hallway, shouting in Mandarin.

Before you even realize it, your hand affixes itself to Napoleon’s waist yet again, pulling him flush against you, pressed up between the file cabinet and the solidity of your body. You do it because he is not entirely encased in darkness, you do it to save the mission. Still, you know you could have achieved the same effect by grabbing a fistful of his baggy black strike clothes and tugging him into the shadow, but you do not. 

This time, he does not ignore you. He grabs your shoulder, eyes flashing up to lock on yours, shining and mocking. “Are we going to waltz, Peril?” 

You make a face, glaring at him and shoving him away from you. His back thuds against the cabinet and he stumbles, off balance, gaze still critical, searching. “Stay out of the light,” you hiss, gesturing to the spill of illumination leaking into the hallway. “They will be back.” 

He nods curtly, but there is something in the tilt of his jaw that makes you feel flayed, exposed. You push the rabbiting of your heart down from your throat back into its rightful place in your chest, swallowing thickly. The next time your bodies are in close proximity, you make sure your hands stay locked at your sides, balled into fists so that if you touch him, it will be a punch, nothing more. 

\---

You wonder about Illya, sometimes. You have intentionally ruffled the feathers of many uninterested men in the past, you have flirted your way under their fists, into their rage. It’s one of the many games you play at the expense of fragile masculinity, one quite different from whatever game you are playing with Illya Kuryakin. Uninterested men do not respond to you the way he does, with his idiot smirks and gentle, deliberate prodding. Uninterested men usually do not have terror in their eyes when things go too far, too fast, unless on some deep and subconscious level of themselves, they are not truly as uninterested as they think. 

You are sitting on a the narrow hotel fire escape, and Singapore bustles beneath you, the jingle of rickshaws and the crackle of frying oil. You have your legs crossed neatly and a newspaper on your lap, and Illya is leaning in the open doorway, too big to fit in the tight space left on the balcony. Gaby is jumping on the bed like a child, repeating the six or so sentences she learned in Mandarin over and over again, her accent improving each time. 

You furrow your brow as you turn the page, and it is strange, how much this feels like home. Not Singapore, necessarily, but _this_. Something wordless, something you should be frightened by, as though _you_ are not truly as uninterested as you think. 

Illya squeezes out onto the balcony, which forces you to conceal a smile attempting to fit itself rudely to your lips as you uncross your legs. You flick the paper up to hide your mouth and mumble, “You’re blocking my light.” 

“What light? The sun is setting.” 

You fold the paper back down onto your lap, creasing it neatly. “All the light. You’re like an _eclipse_ , blotting out the entire horizon line. Were you tormented on the schoolyard for being built like that? Or was it late-onset giantism?” 

Illya does not look at you, he does not even bristle. He merely shoves his hands into his pockets and says, “With a name like Napoleon Solo, surely you are familiar with schoolyard torment.” 

You shrug, studying the lines in his back, the way his sweaters are always too loose-fitting for you to really make out the musculature beneath, forcing you to satisfy yourself by imagining it. “I went by Leon in those days, to save myself from ridicule.” 

Illya almost smiles over his shoulder, instead shooting you a deliberately blank, neutral look. Still, you can make out a sparkle in the blue of his eyes, hidden beneath the soot, the smoke, the ice, like a half-buried diamond. “Leon,” he says clumsily, like he’s trying the word on in his mouth. It makes you feel stupidly, vexatiously warm. “Is that what your friends in New York call you?” 

You draw your brows together in facetious self-pity. “I have no friends.” 

“Fine. What your lady friends call you.” 

Shaking your head, you admit, “No one has called me Leon since I joined the Army. That boy died in the war, I’m afraid.” 

He nods knowingly, like he understands how former selves are erased from existence when you learn to lie, learn to kill. You watch his big, broad hands spread over the balcony railing and grip it, as he again says, “Napoleon,” almost to himself. 

Your stomach turns over. You want his voice in your ear around that word, you want him whispering all four syllables against the pulse in your neck, low and hot and soft. You want it so bad you make a fist in your newspaper, crumpling the article you were reading against your palm. “Hm. It doesn’t sound half as ridiculous when you say it,” you tell him. 

The balcony creaks under your combined weight, not big enough for both of you, and in this moment, you feel like even Singapore isn’t big enough for both of you, you doubt the whole world is. These are disastrous thoughts you are having, so you’re relieved when Illya says, “Russian accent makes most things sound better. But Napoleon. I don’t even know if Russian can save that.” 

He smiles, and you want to keep it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More of this! Huge huge huge thank you to my incredible beta and friend HurdyGurdy, whose enthusiastic editing job on this story managed to keep me galvanized enough to keep writing no matter how exhausting my work week. <3 
> 
> Enjoy!

You can think of few things worse that Napoleon or Gaby dying because of something you did or failed to do. 

Before you started working for U.N.C.L.E., you used to have nightmares about your mother being held captive by faceless men, men who never flinched no matter how hard you struck them, men who kept moving, leering, laughing, even after you had emptied round after round into their chests. Sometimes you still dream of your mother, but more often than not these days, it’s Gaby who is bleeding because of you. Napoleon whose life you are responsible for not saving.

You wake up in a cold sweat some nights, chest heaving and heart pounding, images of their lifeless, beaten bodies shackled to a chain-link fence still fresh in your mind. Always, in your dreams, you are too late.

There would be no issue mentally separating your dreams from reality if Napoleon Solo wasn’t so very good at getting himself into compromising situations. Gaby can fend for herself, and very rarely does she ever end up unconscious in a basement or bleeding out from a gunshot wound or strapped to a godforsaken _electric_ chair. Not like Napoleon, who somehow manages to end up injured, kidnapped, or a combination of the two nearly every single mission. 

You impatiently wait to grow resilient to these episodes, to develop a thicker skin so that you are not thrown into a rage-blind panic every time Napoleon is hurt. You are not used to caring for people, after all, and think that it is like a flu strain you can build an immunity to. Unfortunately, the nightmares only get worse, and as a result, you develop a reputation of sorts as the one who loses your head when missions go sour. Waverly even sits the team down one evening in France to _talk_ about it. 

Napoleon sits across from you all the while, looking terribly smug with his hands folded casually in front of him. You cannot stop staring at his wrists, which bear matching rope burns from when he was tied to a (fortunately breakable) pipe in the boiler room of a lab he was supposed to steal a file from two days ago. The burns still look fresh, red and raw and leaking lymph so steadily that Napoleon has kept his sleeves rolled up to the elbow ever since acquiring the marks, a side effect of this fiasco you find particularly irritating. You do not like to see his bare forearms with their dark, coarse dusting of hair every day; you do _not_ like to be reminded of the two hours he spent with his arms above his head likely thinking he was going to die, while you made a fool of yourself failing to rescue him. All because you did not, _could not_ keep your head. 

You try not to look, but your eyes keep flicking back up to his wrists anyway: the pale, thin skin over his pulse that’s torn, damaged. 

Waverly leaves abruptly after the reprimand, and Gaby follows close behind, visibly fed up with whatever mess you forced her to clean up by compromising the mission. You realize, with your head bent and your cheeks hot, that it was not _you_ who compromised the mission, it was Napoleon Solo and his bare forearms, Napoleon and his flippancy, his disregard for his profession, his country, U.N.C.L.E., all of it. 

He stands and so do you. You’re on his side of the table in a matter of seconds, bearing down on him until you’ve backed him into the wall, your chests mere inches apart. You are close enough you can see the chapped skin beneath the peak of his lips, the razor burn on the left side of his jaw. You are close enough you can smell his skin, not just his aftershave, not just his shampoo. 

He peers up at you with maddening nonchalance, eyes wide and terribly blue as he watches you breathe harsh and fast as if you have just been running. You fight the urge to fit a fist over his throat and force yourself to say, “It is _your_ fault the mission was compromised. Not mine. Waverly should be scolding _you_ like a schoolboy, _not_ me.” 

Napoleon sighs, inching an arm up between your chests. You think that he’s going to push you away, but instead he merely brings his wrist level with your eyes, brandishing his new wounds for you to see. “These are _my_ fault? Are you suggesting that I _wanted_ to hang from a hot water pipe and drip sweat for two hours?” he asks evenly. 

Your stomach twists, and again you want to push down on his windpipe until he is begging for you to let him breathe. Instead you grab the wrist in question, squeezing it until he winces, slamming it above his head and against the wall behind him.. “Stop,” you pant, though you are not sure exactly what it is you want him to stop doing. 

“Really, Peril,” he admonishes around an exhale, head tilting back and dark lashes fluttering. “I never saw you as a _blame_ -placing sort of man. Always thought you were more of the guilty type, the type who beats himself up for every little thing that goes wrong, even the ones he cannot control,” he hisses out. 

You dig your thumbnail into his open wound, and he grits his teeth, whining through them in a way that makes your stomach flood with a wild, nameless heat. You tighten your grip just so that you can hear it again and nearly gasp when you feel his skin rupture and weep beneath you. “I am not placing blame,” you grind out. “I am only _sick_ of wondering whether you’re dead, whether you got yourself killed this time, and I am going to break down door to find your body, you reckless, stupid cowboy.” 

That is when you finally get a reaction. His pupils dilate, and his mouth falls open, and before you have to hear a single word he has to say, you ask him, “Do you take anything seriously? Do you _care_ about missions? Do you care about anything but yourself?” 

He twists in your grip but not out of it. In fact, you’re certain he is only seeking to create more friction rather than actually escaping the hand you have clamped over his wrist, and your awareness of that difference makes your stomach lurch in confusion and directionless longing. You should let him go, you should apologize for all of this, but he is not pushing you off, so you don’t. “I care about very little in the world, Mr. Kuryakin,” Napoleon says to you, eyes a terrifying flint-black pushing a thin rim of blue out so far it nearly disappears. “You should know by now that I have no allegiance to my country. I am not a patriot; I am an art thief, and I only work for organizations such as this one so that I do not end up doing time for my so-called _crimes_.” 

“But do you _want_ to die, then, is that what you want?” you ask, a little desperately. Your eyes sweep over the dry, peeling skin of his lips again, and for a second you imagine smoothing your tongue across it, wetting it so that it does not split. Then, you realize with a deep, terrible clench in your gut what an entirely unacceptable thing it is to think about Napoleon Solo, and you let him go. You push yourself off the wall with shaking palms and stagger back, reeling as you pace for a moment, eyes fixed on the carpet.

“I’m not _trying_ to get myself killed, no,” Napoleon says after a moment. You risk a glance at him, and he is still leaning up against the wall where you put him, cheeks ever so slightly flushed and waistcoat somewhat rumpled but otherwise unflappable, as he always is. “However,” he starts, and you must look away. “If it will make you _feel_ better, I can make an effort to stay out of rope-cuffs and boiler rooms for a change. I may not have loyalty to my country, but I do hate seeing you and Ms. Teller worry.” 

You try to steady your breathing and realize you have nothing to say to him. No excuse for letting him hang from a pipe for two hours, no excuse for being unable to tolerate his bare forearms, no excuse for what you have just done to him, for digging your thumb into his wounds. You shake your head and manage to murmur a clumsy, “I am sorry.” 

He straightens his rolled up sleeves and does not look up at you. “As am I,” he says eventually. 

You feel something open up inside, and you ache. 

\---

You come twice to the memory of Illya rending your skin open under his palm. Three days later, he spills an entire espresso on his new pair of slate grey suit slacks, and you realize with a slow, muted horror that you are in far deeper than you ever intended to be.

Illya spills things into his lap on a fairly regular basis. You are often thrilled, you are often exasperated. You almost always imagine bending your head under the table and affixing your mouth to the new stain, watching from the corner of your eye as his face grows hot and red while you suck balsamic vinegar or wine or espresso out of his clothing. You imagine the scald of his skin beneath it; you imagine his shame, his self-recrimination. 

The terrible spike of fondness, rising like a wave between your lungs and choking you silent, is somewhat new and somewhat unexpected, however. You hold a hand over your sternum as it happens, curious if this is something you can touch. Can you feel the heat through the bones of your ribcage? Could Gaby, who is seated directly across from you and snorting hysterically into her croissant as Illya stands and dabs furiously at his pants with a cloth napkin, cast her gaze upon you and notice something different? Are you as obviously, visibly _enthralled_ as you feel? 

“We can’t take you anywhere!” Gaby chuckles, shaking her head so her earrings swing back and forth, giant white plastic hoops that remind you of shower curtain rings. “I know I am the mechanic, but _you_ are the one who is uncouth.” 

“This table,” Illya grumbles, dropping down to one knee to collect the napkin, which he has just dropped, “is too small.”

You flatten your lips into a line, peer down at Illya from above the rim of your sunglasses. “Have you ever considered the alternative, Peril, which is that you are simply _too big_?” 

Gaby explodes into giggles again, laying her head down on the table as if she has not just accused someone else of being uncouth. It gives you an excuse to tear your eyes away from Illya, who is still crouching on the ground, indeed too big for this cafe and its absurd Parisian tables hardly wider than pie pans. “Gaby,” you plead with false sincerity, “I was counting on you to keep up appearances with me.” 

She gestures weakly and vaguely with a delicate wrist, shoulders rocking with laughter. Illya sits down to your left, and you let out a long, pained sigh. Your gaze falls upon him, disgruntled and pouting like a child beneath the rim of the stupid hat that you hate. He looks so absurd, so out of place, this killer who once pried the back bumper off a moving car off with his bare hands, who once inched those same hands on the small of your back so tenderly while you braced yourself to shoot a man dead. He is too big for this table, for Paris, and whatever you are feeling is too big for your chest. With a fierce and sudden tightness around your heart, you think, _wow._

 

\---

You did not notice art before Napoleon Solo. You knew it was there, that it was something very many people felt very strongly about, but you were simply not one of them. You liked Russian art, purely and simply because it was Russian. You liked classical statues, the incredible detail to the marble, the muscles so carefully sculpted they looked as if the Greeks merely poured a casing of plaster over a living body that could break free at any given moment, breathing. 

Beyond those vague and uninterrogated preferences, you didn’t think much about art at all, unless you were mentally writing it off as frivolous, indulgent. Something American tourists came to other countries to ogle at without any real depth of understanding. 

You did not know, for example, that art could _move_ people, until you witness Napoleon Solo being moved by art. 

The two of you are running through the streets of Paris to escape a T.H.R.U.S.H. agent when Napoleon grabs your elbow and stops abruptly, nearly taking you down with him as he spins on his heel, stumbles. “What are you _doing_?” You hiss, trying to wrench away from his biting grip. 

He’s not looking at you, though, he’s staring across the street to the Louvre and the bustling crowds before it, snapping photographs and milling about on the lawn like so many insects on a piece of rotten fruit. “Let’s lose him in there,” he says, immediately steering you into moving traffic and toward the museum.

A taxi bleats its horn and another swerves to avoid you, but still, you follow him. You always do. It has become a compulsion of sorts, to go tripping after Napoleon no matter where he takes you. Into the darkest of hallways, to the seafloor, across a crowded intersection and into the Louvre. 

As you file inside he bustles his way past the guards, straightening his jacket and slowing to a casual, nonchalant walk. Instantly, he almost disappears into a throng of people, as if he is one of them. In contrast, you struggle to steady your labored breathing, to look natural beside him in this place that does not feel natural. “Try and blend in Peril, Jesus,” he snaps over his shoulder, swiping a sticker from the sweater of a women he passes, plucking it from cashmere with elegant fingers. He turns and places it neatly on your jacket lapel. “Look, you even paid to get inside. Try and appear less _sullen_ , please.” 

The longer you spend meandering through marble hallways, bumping awkwardly into tourists and shooting glances over your shoulder every few seconds to see if you really _have_ lost the agent, the more you realize that you are not in here solely to shake whoever was tailing you: you’re in here because Napoleon _wants_ to be. He’s staring with his neck craned and his eyes glassy at every piece you pass, stopping to let his gaze linger meaningfully on some longer than others, arms crossed and Adam’s apple bobbing. You grow impatient with him, knowing he must have been here a hundred times in his past, he must have procured items from this collection, for this collection. “Let’s go, we have no need to be here,” you groan at one point, and he glares at you, scandalized. 

“ _Why_? He’s gone, and I’ve just acquired us free admission. Is there somewhere you’d _rather_ kill time until we hear from Gaby?” 

You can think of countless places where you would rather kill time, actually, but you can tell that Napoleon doesn’t care. He is exactly where he wants to be, indulging his predilection for pretty, rare, pointless things. You think of what he once told you, _I am not a patriot, I am an art thief_ , as if being an art thief was his first and best qualifier. More important that being an American, than being a man. You do not understand, but you find with a thread of surprise twined tight around your throat that you do not _need_ to understand in order to sympathize, in order to crave in some base and reactionary way the satisfaction of giving him what he wants. 

Your eyes fall back on him, the line of his spine beneath his suit jacket, so straight and upright until it gives way to the deep, soft curve of his lower back. He’s staring at a painting you would have failed to notice if it were hanging in your hotel room, a murky, unobtrusive depiction of a gondola floating on a green lake. He has forgotten you again, peering into a painting as if he could imagine living inside the tiny world depicted therein. “Isn’t it lovely?” he asks then, with none of his usual sarcasm, none of his usual wit. 

The words sting as you hear them, too vulnerable for you to touch without getting blood on your palms. “I suppose so,” you mumble. And in spite of yourself, you take a step closer to him, so you can stare at the fine white curve of that gondola, too, like a swan’s neck slicing through so much still water.

\---

It is such a rare treat to see Illya even the slightest bit drunk. You love to lounge at a distance and watch him, his seams coming apart ever so slightly, his cheeks growing pink and hot beneath the cut of the bone as he plays chess with Gaby, all clumsy fingers and childish indigence when he loses. You will sometimes catch sight of the occasional smile, melted at the corners like a pat of butter with its edges softening as it slides across the bottom of a frying pan. 

You lay with your shirt open and a shot glass tilting dangerously in your hand, thinking with a reckless sort of abandon that you have never felt such raw, unfiltered fondness in your whole life. Illya knocks down all the white pieces he has collected from Gaby, who busts out in messy laughter, standing to twirl in victory as she captures his queen. 

“You are cheating,” he accuses, with no real venom in his voice. You watch him tilt back in his chair, knees apart, cheeks flushed. “There is no other explanation.” 

“Beginner’s luck,” she mocks, leaning across the table to kiss Illya on the temple, the dark sweep of her lashes against her cheek like the wing of a sooty black bird. She’s lovely; they both are, and something dark coils snake-tight in your chest. You finish off your drink, and it burns. 

Gaby shrugs on her jacket, white Dior with black buttons, and it looks absurd over her baggy pajamas. You have never seen Gaby in a negligee. She always wears cuffed flannels and oversized tee shirts to bed, and the mere thought of her in a dressing gown almost makes you snort at the silliness of it all.

She salutes the both of you. “I am going to quit while I am ahead. Goodnight, comrades.” Then, with her chunky sandals tossed over her shoulder, she stumbles off to bed. As the door clicks shut behind her, you let yourself look at Illya again, the bunch of his shoulders somewhat looser than usual with liquor, the blue of his eyes like a summer sky instead of their usual tundra.

“She is cheating,” he repeats, shaking his head. 

You shrug. “She is a good spy.” 

“I am a good spy, and I don’t cheat.”

“Oh, Peril, is it so painful to admit that a four-foot-tall former mechanic in fake eyelashes puts your logic to shame?” you chide. You wonder if Illya will take the bait. You do not want to talk about Gaby outright, he will most certainly deny that there is anything between them if you _ask_ him, if you bring her up. And maybe there isn’t; you don’t know because you will never understand men who are not opportunists, men who will pass up beautiful little girls like Gaby just because their lives do not allow for stability, for love. 

“She is not four feet tall,” is what Illya says. You should have anticipated as much. 

_Are you in love with her?_ you want to ask. _Do you want her? Have you fucked? Have I simply been too lost in my own games to notice?_ You know any of these things will make him bristle and harden, turn away and accuse you of being too drunk, too crass. You sigh, setting your empty glass down on the carpet, where it falls over. “Tell me something, Peril. You’re dreadful company, but you’re handsome enough it shouldn’t matter, so, how come you never bring women back to your room?” 

He looks up suddenly, eyes hard and overflowing with pupil, and you are very pleased with how stunned he is, how disarmed. After a moment, he regains his composure and shoots back, “Just because _you_ so desperately need the company of women, Cowboy, does not mean--”

“Is it because of Ms. Teller?” you ask then, and you do not mean for your voice to sound the way it sounds. Quiet and grave, not a joke at all like you wanted it to be. 

You expect him to get red-faced and defensive, but that is not what happens. He merely sighs, waving a broad hand through the air in front of him, as if irritatedly dispelling a cloud of smoke you have just blown into his face. “No,” he says, shaking his head. “It is nothing like that...it was...was a long time ago.” 

“Not that long ago,” you remind him, shamed to find yourself _relieved_ at how dismissive he’s being. You would not have consciously admitted to jealousy; jealousy is something you abhor, after all, something you have no right to after a lifetime of infidelity, disloyalty, even cruelty. Still, there is a feeling in your chest you cannot name when you imagine Gaby and Illya together, a coldness at having been shut out somehow from the first warmth you’ve felt in decades. 

“Long enough,” he says. 

“Why, then? Surely, opportunities have arisen. There was that girl in Singapore, the shopkeeper's daughter? She was practically climbing you.” 

Illya makes a face. “Unlike you, I do not sleep with every woman who looks twice.” 

“But do you sleep with _any_?” you ask, head spinning. You are drunker than you thought, and he must be, too; you cannot believe that you’re discussing something as base and filthy as _sex_ with Illya, here in your own hotel room. Illya, who could have kissed Gaby all those months ago in Rome but didn’t; Illya, who rolls his eyes spectacularly every time you lean out of your compartment to watch a woman sashay down the aisle of a train, treating you like a child who should not be allowed in public until he learns manners. 

“It is...” Illya starts, resting his elbows on his knees and dropping his head down between them so that his voice is muffled and you can no longer see the flush on his cheeks, can no longer imagine pressing your fingers into the heat of it, can no longer imagine the bloodless indentations you would leave when you let go. “It is very much work. To meet, talk, smile. Perhaps all that is worth it for you, but for me...I would rather not bother.” 

You sigh, dry-mouthed, anxious. There are things you want to offer him, but they are stuck in your throat. You _know_ that Illya Kuryakin is a flight risk, that you have to be very, very careful in whatever you offer because he is just as likely to spook and throw you as he is to do anything else. “Don’t be such a spoilsport,” you tell him. “It doesn’t _always_ have to be an ordeal. I’m sure you could find a situation without all the meeting and talking and smiling, if you really wanted that.” 

“I don’t pay for sex,” he grumbles. 

Your eyes flutter shut; you are frustrated by his inexperience. It makes it that much harder to make yourself available. “You wouldn’t _have_ to,” you say eventually. 

He looks up at you again, eyes dark and fierce and puzzled, and you worry that you overplayed your hand. You imagine him rising to his full height, hauling you up off the couch with his huge hand fisted in your open shirt and demanding an explanation. You think of the smell of his breath, of your own scarred wrist pinned above your head while he begged you to tell him whether or not you wanted to die, and your cock twitches in your trousers at the memory. You are too drunk for this conversation, and you’re about to invent a way out when he says, “I do not... _enjoy_ sex if it is casual.” 

You shut your mouth, only just now realizing it had been hanging open. “I see,” you say after a moment, heart thudding. You are glad he is several feet away, you are glad you are not positioned in such a way he could have seen you, lips parted enough one could push a finger or two inside, if they wanted to. “So you’re a romantic,” you add slowly. _You, Peril? I never would have expected_ , you want to say, but you do not trust it to come out in a way that does not bely something stripped and raw inside you, you do not trust yourself to apply the necessary amount of sarcasm to make it come out biting. 

“No,” he argues. “I am not. It is just...not as good, with stranger.” 

_It doesn’t have to be a stranger_ , you think of telling him, but you know it’s too much, too blunt. You swallow, dizzy and hot-cheeked and well aware that you may not be in control of this increasingly delicate game. “Hm,” you say, finally deciding that this is as good a time as any to cast your line and leave before you have time to see the hook catch, or not. “Well,” you offer slowly, struggling to sit up as the room spins around you. “If you ever change your mind, please consider the fact that I _did_ spend a considerable slice of the 40s serving in the U.S. Army.” You let it hang in the air between you as you stand, steadying yourself on the back of the couch, taking in Illya and his eyes, dark with confusion. You wait for something to change, for dawn to break over his flushed face, but he simply stares back at you, silent, throat flickering. 

You want to affix your mouth to it, you want to show him how rewarding casual sex _can_ be, you are even willing to offer him romance, if that is the thing which will change this. So many terrible, impossible wishes, and you are too drunk to be waiting here for Illya Kuryakin to figure out what men did together after lights out in 1942. You feel foolish and sick and half-hard and aching, unsteady as you stand and button your shirt up to the collar. “Good night, Peril,” you say, and leave.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of the most fun to write chapters of this whole long thing! Enjoy and thank you for the reviews and kudos, as always!

You are in the Sausalito home of art enthusiast and potential member of a Chinese crime syndicate, Parker M. Wilson. As you search his belongings, you are reminded too much of Napoleon. You tiptoe through Wilson’s hallways and root around in his bedside drawers, careful to put everything back just as it was, aware that six months ago, you would not have noticed the Liechtenstein hanging above his four poster. If you _had_ noticed it, you would have scoffed at the juvenile, comic-book style of American pop art with its bold lines and repeated dots. You certainly would not have filed it away neatly in your brain to bring up to Napoleon later, _he has terrible taste in art, Cowboy, just like you_.You certainly would not have let your gaze linger, remembering that afternoon in the Louvre. 

In his study there is a six-paneled frame of Picasso line drawings and what very well might be a Duchamp sculpture, a wrought-iron pipe melted and twisted into a vaguely phallic shape. You rifle through Wilson’s bills and think about what Napoleon has taught you about Dadaism, the intentional humor and nonsense you missed until he pointed it out to you. _They’re poking fun at high art, Peril. You would probably get along with the Dadaists.Or, you would if you had any sense of humor to speak of._

You grit your teeth, resisting the urge to knock the Duchamp to the carpet. You do not want to think of Napoleon as much as you do. You do not want to navigate the world as if he were with you, even when he’s not, collecting things to tell him about, tease him about. You do not want to be caught in the orbit of a man whose _job_ is to compel people, magnetize them so that they cannot see the storm that rages just outside the smooth blue of his eyes. You feel like one in a million identical girls he has captured in his web and sucked the flesh from, and you resent it. 

Still, as you pad down the stairs, you notice the Man Ray photos, you notice the Schad, the Hugnet, and then, in the sprawling foyer hanging above the door, the Miró. Things you wish Napoleon were here to see and admire, for he certainly has a deeper appreciation than you could ever muster for paintings that look like a child did them. You have had to drag him from the homes of marks in the past, push him out the door so he did not steal things from the wall and incidentally blow their cover. _It’s a shame_ , he often says, _that such bad men can afford such lovely art._

On your way out, you notice a mahogany armoire near the door and stop to make sure you haven’t missed anything. You find a crisp red envelop with a fistful of yuan inside it, in addition to a handwritten letter in Chinese and a small revolver tucked away in a black box. It is too considerable an amount of yuan for your average businessman with the surname Wilson, so you tap into your bug to alert Gaby, listing descriptors of the items you have found so she can jot them down. 

As you carefully remove items from the shelves, you find a shattered frame with a photo montage inside. Your gloves come back powdered in dust; it has not been touched for a very long time. Something forgotten, yellowed and signed in a messy German scrawl. It’s hideous, exactly the type of thing Napoleon would try and convince you was brilliant, so without thinking much about it, you carefully tug it from beneath the layer of shattered glass and pocket it. It slides easily into your breast pocket, just a small, palm-sized thing, right over your heart. 

You leave Wilson’s house feeling thrilled and disgusted, your stomach in knots and your palms sweating in their gloves. 

The team rendezvous point is at a crowded pizza parlor in little Italy, and you struggle to be heard over the din as you describe Wilson’s home. “He had too much money for bonds salesman,” you say. “And he used it poorly. Receipts for bar, notes for gambling on boxing matches, bad art on the walls.” Your eyes flick to Napoleon, who eats his pizza slices folded in half, so the cheese oozes out lewdly when he bites down. You scowl. 

“Using it poorly is a matter of taste. I’d say he was using it in an acceptable fashion, if not recklessly. I also don’t trust when Peril says ‘bad art’; it could mean anything that’s not Russian.” 

Gaby rolls her eyes. “I’m more concerned with the yuan and the revolver. Did you take a bullet so we could compare it to the ones used in the Chen shootings?” 

You slide your hand into your breast pocket, fingers brushing against the photo collage before the bullet in question. “Yes,” you say. “I also brought Cowboy this. Was forgotten in bottom drawer.” 

You tug the crumpled paper out and smooth it onto the table in front of Napoleon, realizing with a troublesome tightness in your stomach that you brought him a _gift_ , such a childish, foolish thing to do when you are an adult who favors professionalism, who abhors the material acquisition of frivolous items. 

He stares at the photo collage for a moment, very slowly and methodically chewing a mouthful of pizza. Finally, he swallows and looks up at you, something unreadable in the wide crystal blue of his eyes. “Peril,” he says, gaze flashing, sparkling. “You really shouldn’t have.” 

“You’re right, he shouldn’t,” Gaby grumbles. “Waverly is not going to like this.” 

Napoleon is leaning over the photo collage, thumbing over the corners and narrowing his eyes. “This looks like a Hannah Hoch,” he muses, one eyebrow arched. “Only Peril would fold up a Hannah Hoch and stick it in his _pocket_ for safekeeping. He really is the most charming man I’ve ever met,” he says, eyes flicking up to you and brow terribly furrowed. You expect to detect sarcasm, you expect his usually impenetrable glassiness, the defensive cocktail of cavalier mocking, suave indifference. But it is not what you see. You have no name for the way Napoleon is looking at you, but the closest word of the many that come fruitlessly to mind is _awe_. You abruptly look away, jaw so tense it aches. 

“I knew you’d like it because it was ugly and made from newspaper,” you say, possibly too late and too unconvincingly to be a real retort. “I see it does not disappoint.” 

“You didn’t bring me anything?” Gaby pouts, batting her mascara clotty lashes up at you, lower lip pushed out to mock that of a spoiled child. 

“There was likely nothing to your taste,” Napoleon quips, tucking the alleged Hannah Hoch into his waistcoat. “But next time he gets intel from an auto repair shop, I’m sure he’ll swipe you some bolts for your collection. Perhaps even a wrench.” 

“And I will be very happy,” she says before slurping the last of her cola through a straw. “I have no use for newspaper clippings glued together into the shape of a woman.” 

“I brought you a bullet,” Illya reminds her, dropping the ammunition he collected from the revolver into her outstretched palm. 

“See?” she says, curling her fingers over it before sliding it into one of the small interior pockets of her purse. “He knows us so well.” 

\---

Parker Wilson knows he is being followed. He’s a twitchy, paranoid man without the slightest idea how to properly use his revolver, so when he fires blindly into the alleyway you’re attempting to disappear into, the bullet only grazes your arm. It stings, and your vision whites out temporarily, but you manage to get a better shot in, below his left knee. He crumples to the ground, crying out and dragging himself to slump pathetically against the wall across from you, his torn trousers snagging across filthy, puddled pavement. You cock your head to look at him, thinking you might have made a mistake. No ringleader in any respectable crime syndicate holds a gun like that. You sigh, sitting down to ensure Wilson doesn’t _go_ anywhere. 

Over the radio, you let Gaby and Illya know what has happened and that you don’t need a medic. You prefer when Illya plays nurse, his inexpert bandages and crude stitches. You want scars from him, and you have them. 

Between an overflowing dumpster and a warped wooden pallet, you wait. Fog seeps into the alley, cold and damp, and you dig your fingers into the flesh around your bullet wound to slow the bleeding, eyes trained on Wilson as he groans against the wall, pleading uselessly for his life, sounds you are already so sick of. 

By the time U.N.C.L.E. agents arrive to back you up, your throat is quite sore, and you’re too dizzy to stand. It’s not a terrible wound; not particularly deep or wide, but you bleed more freely than you would like, and your fingers are numb with cold, too clumsy to make a tourniquet from your kerchief. When Illya sees you, you watch for the telltale twitch in his temple, his jaw, an involuntary tightening of his fists. These are the signs that tell you he cares more than he wants to, that the sight of you injured sickens him, angers him. Even hurts him as you are hurt, as if the damage done to your body shows up on his skin, too, by some mistake in your designs. Crossed wires, twined limbs. You do not find your satisfaction at this notion to be honorable, but there is little about you that is, so it does not affect you much to indulge in it. You’re a cruel, careless man who takes pleasure in the way Illya hurts for you, since you cannot take pleasure in him taking pleasure in you. It’s either something he does not see, or refuses to see. You sit with your head tilted against the cold alley wall, mired in complacent self-pity. 

Illya drops down to his knee beside you, hulking and rage-tight and humming with fury. “You are hurt,” he observes, fingers flexing in the cold foggy mist between you, inches above your injured arm but not touching, as if he doesn’t trust himself not to inflict further damage.

“Hardly,” you tell him, grimacing. “I could have tied it up and strolled back to you and Gaby, but I thought it might be insensitive to leave Mr. Wilson here to bleed out. I am nothing if not sensitive.” 

Illya makes a face you cannot read. It’s not unusual; most of his expressions are beyond your comprehension, this is likely one of the reasons you cannot stop digging, cannot stop dreaming of what it would be like to slide your fingers between skin and muscle and pry him apart to see what’s beneath. “Give me your arm,” he demands, long fingers outstretched. 

You wince, fitting your bicep into his hand. “The bastard ruined my Holden-Reid.” 

Illya smooths his thumb across copper-slick grey wool, leaning close enough that you can smell the sea salt in his clothes, his hair. He helps you out of the suit jacket, and you cringe as the fabric peels away from your skin, where the blood has begun to clot. Your dress shirt clings to you with a layer of fever sweat and not-quite rain, your chest hair visible through the sheer wet of it. You think, for a moment, that he’s going to strip you out of that shirt, too, but instead he merely fits his fingers into the tear and rips it apart. “And you ruined my Gabicci,” you tell him, trying to sound appalled. 

“Was already ruined,” he mumbles, rending it further apart so that the wound is fully exposed. You can hear Wilson screaming as U.N.C.L.E. agents drag him away, you can hear Gaby’s voice smooth and young and flirtatious as she sweet-talks a San Francisco PD officer. You glance down at your arm, thinking that your skin looks so pale, marble spattered in blood beneath the gold of Illya’s fingers. Your eyes flutter closed. You should not be happy, slumped against a filthy cement wall, wearing the ruins of your once fine suit, but you are.

“Sorry it took so long to find you,” Illya says after a moment, dabbing gently at your arm with some gauze. You imagine the white of it stained pink with your peroxide-diluted blood, and he adds, “Wilson was a decoy. Framed by T.H.R.U.S.H. agents working with Chinese syndicate to throw us off their trail.” 

“I knew he was too dreadful a shot to be a true criminal,” you say. Illya’s touch burns too-warm against the chill of your skin, stinging as he drags the gauze over the bullet graze. The peroxide bubbles and fizzes as he pulls away, somewhat nauseating and you are _so_ cold your teeth are rattling, but still you do not want him to stop. You wonder when you became the kind of man who wishes your injuries were worse, so that you could prolong the ritual of another man cleaning them. 

He dabs your skin dry so that he can adhere a neat row of butterfly bandages. “You’re getting better at those,” you muse. 

He glares up at you, the soft shape of his mouth flattening into a fierce, bloodless line. “Only because you are always needing them.” He tapes a square of gauze over the butterflies, hand lingering over the crisp white edges as if protecting you from rain not yet fallen. “You’re done,” he says then, holding your gaze too long, long enough your eyes begin to sting and your heart stops in your chest because you’re sure something is about to break. The fishing line that has been pulled tight between you ever since you decided not to kill each other in Rome, the hook in your heart tugged increasingly taut with each successive mission, each new bullet graze and butterfly bandage and night spent watching the shift of Illya Kuryakin’s shoulders beneath black wool as he plays chess, stunned that _this_ is the thing that has changed you. 

You mean to grin at him, sharp and dashing to dispel whatever is surely collecting in your pupils, but you don’t. It gets stuck on your lips, which merely twitch at the corners in a failed smile. “Stop getting shot,” he says then, before standing to help you unsteadily to your feet. 

You wobble and imagine collapsing onto him just so that you can steal something from his pocket in the moments your bodies are pressed flush. A used tissue, a receipt for the first aid, his father’s watch. You want more than your hands can hold; you’re dizzy and so cold you’re numb; you might have a fever, you might be in love. 

It’s an affliction you never prepared yourself to endure the terror and sickness of, so you feel lost as it thuds inside you, a buoy bobbing helplessly out in the marina. _Wow_ , you think as you shiver in your torn shirt. Gaby looks at you and pouts, shrugging out of her taupe camel’s hair coat, which she dumps inelegantly onto your shoulders. “Don’t freeze, Solo,” she says. “T.H.R.U.S.H. would be entirely too pleased to hear you died of hypothermia after maiming their decoy.” 

“Luckily, I think I’ll end up disappointing them yet again,” you say, wrapping the camel’s hair tight around your shoulder, wincing at it compresses your wound. Illya reaches out to steady you, and you feel _insane_ , restless and tight-chested and like you _must_ do something willfully self-destructive soon lest this wild, boundless feeling trapped within your body rip you apart. You fix your eyes briefly on Illya, the scar on his brow, whiter than the white of his skin before it gives way to a flush upon his cheeks. He lets go and ducks away from you, avoiding your gaze as if he has been caught doing something inappropriate. It’s either something he does not see, or refuses to see. 

You grit your chattering teeth together, hard. “To celebrate my miraculous recovery,” you offer. “I think we should go out tonight.” 

\---

Napoleon drags you to the most crowded dim sum joint in all of Chinatown. It’s just a hole in the wall with a line out the door, with so many milling people all jammed between an herbalist and a laundromat that you don’t feel like there is enough room for the bulk of your body inside it, you don’t feel like you are narrow enough to fit through that door and spend the whole evening watching Napoleon Solo get drunk on Tsingato. 

The damp sidewalk glistens under a neon glow, and something about the night feels electric. The air is charged, pulled too tightly so that the threat of snapping lingers over you like the fog, seeping insidiously into your clothes so that you’re tense, chilled, wet. Everything moves too quickly. He steers you and Gaby into the bustling restaurant, and you duck because, as you anticipated, you are too tall. You’re not even sure you can comfortably fit inside the packed waiting area, thick with chattering people all elbow to elbow. You cannot read Chinese, so you do not know the name of the restaurant. You do not know the name of anything. It smells like soy sauce and vinegar and fried oil, and you tower above everyone, eyes trained on the back of Napoleon’s head like he is the North Star, how you will sail your way home at the end of all this. 

Somehow, Napoleon manages to bypass the wait time. He disappears into a throng of people and reemerges minutes later, winking at you and Gaby and gesturing over his shoulder. A small, unflappable woman in a hairnet guides and deposits the three of you at an enormous table topped with a lazy susan. You’re sharing it with several other parties, all of whom are shouting and laughing and drinking, spinning the table back and forth to twirl liberal servings of noodles onto their plates with chopsticks. 

You sit down, too warm and overwhelmed. You’re finding it very hard to look at Napoleon tonight without your stomach turning over. Perhaps it was the bullet graze from earlier, his skin so pale, his blood half-coagulated against your fingers as you tore his shirt. You cannot shake the image, it clings to you like wet fabric, and his eyes seem too blue under these fluorescent lights, the peak of his lips too sharp. Something you could get lost in, and you don’t want to be any more lost than you already are, at this restaurant you don’t know the name of, staring fruitlessly at a menu you can’t even begin to read. 

You elbow Napoleon, who is sitting beside you chatting in Chinese with one of the men at your table, a neat-looking businessman with oiled hair and horn-rimmed glasses. “I do not like eating with strangers,” you grumble, refusing to grace him with your gaze. Instead, you fix your eyes ahead of you, on the inscrutable menu. “And I do not read Chinese.” 

“Think of this as a cultural experience in addition to a meal,” Napoleon offers, jabbing you none too gently in the shoulder with his chopsticks. They are white plastic with tiny red characters on them, not the disposable peel-apart wooden variety that you’ve seen before. They’re clumsy in your fingers, too smooth and cold for you to work properly, but Napoleon is gesturing animatedly with his as he speaks, making shapes in the air. He is ridiculous; he shouldn’t be allowed in public. “You can’t leave San Francisco without squishing into a communal table and stuffing yourself to near immobility with Chinatown’s best dim sum, Peril. I’ll order for you and Ms. Teller. Just sit back and try and have a nice time; you look _dreadful,_ like someone kicked your puppy.” 

You are too tall to sit back, and Napoleon’s eyes are too blue for you to have a nice time, and you do not and will not ever have a _puppy_. Napoleon is too _everything_ ; he’s talking too fast and too quickly and flirting with the completely disinterested waitress too hard, like a soldier on his last day of shore leave, a dying man on his last day before the electric chair. You’re embarrassed for him, but more than that, you’re embarrassed that you ache, your heartstrings wound tight around a throbbing confusion festering deep inside you. It is embarrassment, but it’s also pity. Sympathy. You want to grab Napoleon Solo by his shoulders and shake him hard, tell him, _you foolish, foolish man. I am right here,_ but even you don’t know what you truly mean by that. Or perhaps you do, but it’s too blinding and terrifying a thing to examine here, now, in a restaurant so loud you have to shout to be heard in it. 

You sit, ears ringing with the din of so many voices talking at once, half-watching Gaby stumble charmingly through a conversation in broken Chinese with one of the strangers at your table. Napoleon keeps pouring you more and more tea, reaching over you and refilling your little porcelain cup, steaming hot and so small that there is no comfortable way for you to hold it. You feel like a man in a dollhouse, too big for this table and for this teacup while Napoleon orders half the menu, leaning well into your already limited space. 

Your stomach is growling and you cannot stop thinking about the way Napoleon’s blood stained his shirt; you cannot stop thinking about the bandage taped inexpertly to his skin beneath the new suit jacket he changed into. He still has not changed the dressings, however, and you think about that, too. 

Eventually, dim sum comes to your table in an endless parade. Steamed dumplings in circular tin dishes, shrimp and pork and scallions, sticky rice in lotus leaves, red bean buns coated in black sesame seeds, and one hundred other things you can’t name or even identify by sight. It all tastes salty and it all tastes good, and you cannot speak and you cannot look at Napoleon, so you busy yourself with eating it all, deliberately and systematically, like it is your job. 

You can feel Napoleon watching you. Burning beneath his gaze, you wait for him to say something: _this isn’t a contest, Peril, or don’t hurt yourself._ No jab comes, however. He is simply _looking_ at you for what you feel is a disproportionate amount of time compared to the time he spends looking at other things, even the waitress who he keeps asking to join him at the table for a Tsingato after her shift is over. 

You bite into something you don’t like, a green steamed dumpling that tastes entirely too much like the ocean. Sea vegetables and bits of minced fish fall out, and you put it back on your plate, wrinkling your nose in displeasure as you reach for something safer. Napoleon inches his fingers onto your shoulder and asks, “Are you not going to eat the rest of that? It’s a shame to let anything go to waste, not to mention terribly rude.” 

“It tastes like licking the bottom of a pier,” you tell him shortly, shrugging his fingers off you. 

“Don’t mind if I do,” he says then, reaching deliberately onto your plate with his chopsticks and snatching the half-eaten dumpling off it before popping it into his mouth. 

You have been trying to avoid looking at him, but you are so appalled by this display that you glare in spite of yourself. He stares back at you, eyes wide with mock innocence as he chews and swallows. “More tea?” he asks, pouring you another tiny, impractical cup. 

Your face burns as you look at him, the hectic flush across his cheeks from too much Tsingato and too much steam, the way his usually neat hair has come undone and fallen into his face, where it sticks to his brow with a sheen of perspiration. He looks back at you with something almost _threatening_ in his eyes, a glint like a diamond glittering from beneath a layer of filth, and your stomach twists painfully.

It has been like this ever you watched his wounds hiss and bubble as you doused them with peroxide. He’s looking at you like he knows something, like he sees something, some secret regard you have kept locked up, hidden. He’s looking at you like he knows what you want, which should be impossible because you don’t even know what you want. 

Or perhaps you do, but you also know the impracticality, the recklessness, the _stupidity_ of wanting so many terrible, impossible conflicting things. Too much to want from or ask of another person, which is why you will not give voice or even thought to it, which is why you _should not_ look at him right now, lest you lose control and let something spill over inside you, flicker up to your eyes bare and raw where he could see it, get his nails into it, his teeth. 

He takes something else off your plate, just as he slowly, deliberately presses the length of his thigh up against yours under the table. 

Something short circuits inside you, and your stomach ignites with a fierce, involuntary wave of arousal. You wrench away from him, glowering over your shoulder because he _should not_ do such things in the middle of dinner, he should not do such things at all. 

“I’ll take whatever you don’t want, Peril,” he says, lightly tapping the edge of your plate with his chopsticks, eyes still so terrible and twinkling and blue. “Or whatever you do.” 

You stare at your now empty plate, the smudges of soy sauce and chili paste blending together into a shapeless blur as you grip the edge of the table with fierce palms, thinking that Napoleon _should not_ play games like that, but more pressingly, you should not lose your vision and stomach when he does. 

Gaby somehow gets very drunk very suddenly, and keeps slopping onto your other shoulder and telling you how grateful she is for something you don’t even remember doing. It gives you an excuse to turn away from Napoleon for a moment, tending to Gaby so she doesn’t end up breaking the bones of any of the men who are noticing her inebriation and trying to take advantage of it. They are less likely to ask her if she wants to come see their fancy new car if your arm is resting along the back of her chair, so you busy yourself with that task. Every once and awhile, Napoleon’s gaze will sweep over you, and your skin will prickle in response, but you manage to avoid returning it, you manage to keep your heart from your throat. 

At some point, he drops his chopsticks on the ground, and while he waits for a replacement pair, he uses his _fingers_ to eat. He dabs his dumplings in spicy mustard and licks a wayward drop from his thumb; he dips his index finger into the taro tapioca before sucking it off, eyebrow cocked as he jokes uselessly and mortifyingly with the waitress. His table manners are deplorable tonight, and you realize with a strange, creeping clarity that you have never seen him _quite_ like this: so willfully, gleefully excessive. He is putting on a show. Not for the benefit of a mark or a mission or even the unimpressed waitress. You can tell by the way his eyes keep drifting back, careful and calculating, that Napoleon Solo is putting on a show _for you_. 

The revelation hits you like cold water, sliding down your spine, making you shiver. Until recently, you have been able to ignore whatever has been brewing unspoken between you and Napoleon ever since U.N.C.L.E.’s inception, or at least chalk the tension up to professional competition, friendly antagonism, culture clash. However, something has changed, and you no longer feel capable of ignoring it. He is putting on a show for you and for what? Why you? Why does he think it will affect you if he presses his leg against yours under the table, why does he think it will garner a response of some kind if he touches his food with his bare hands? Furthermore, _why is he right_? 

You used to not think much about finding Napoleon attractive. Now, with a surge of awful heat in your gut, you realize that there is a substantial difference between finding Napoleon attractive and being _attracted to_ Napoleon. You watch his hands flicker across the table, broad-knuckled and clean and pale as he pours himself more tea, serves himself more noodles, wipes hoisin from his fingers with a frayed, filthy paper napkin. You want to hate him, you want to want to break those fingers and shove him up against the wall and feel nothing but muted rage, inflamed irritation. But you know that this is not what you would feel. 

For the most fleeting of moments, you imagine what it would be like if you let him kiss you. To cave to his incessant pushing, the curious prodding of a young child, interested in the interaction and reaction of things but not the things themselves. For that is how you conceive of Napoleon Solo; cruel and beautiful and cunning, incapable of genuine feeling, of _love._

You _try_ to imagine yourself shoving him off, you try to imagine yourself doing anything, anything at all save for crumbling under him in a tide of broken resolve, reaching for him, pulling him toward you as your flesh converged. 

Napoleon reaches all the way across your plate, so that he can snag something off Gaby’s. “Sorry, Peril,” he says, not sounding very sorry at all. Your eyes lock magnetically and inevitably upon his, and you see that he’s _amused_. He is playing a game with you, trying to see how close he can get to the mouth of the volcano until you either explode, or, perhaps more likely, drown him in a surge of heat. _And then what_ , you wonder desperately, teeth grit together hard as he sidles away. _Then what will you do with me?_

You need air. You stand up abruptly, nearly upending your chair in the process, aware of the familiar burn of Napoleon’s eyes on your back as you storm to the bathroom, insides in knots. 

It’s a tight bathroom, only six or so square feet with precariously stacked cleaning supplies half-hidden behind a bamboo screen taking up several of those feet. You hunch over the sink, splashing your face with cold water, waiting for your cheeks to cool, your heart to slow. After a few deep and deliberate breaths, you examine your reflection in the mirror: eyes slightly bloodshot. A scar over your right brow, white and curved like a sickle moon. A small muscle twitching in your jaw, where water drips down, collects in the hollow of your throat. You are rough around the edges; you have the face of a killer no matter how many times you wash it, no matter how many deep breaths you take. You squint hard at yourself and wonder if Napoleon can see past the tundra, the scrub brush, into the part of you that so badly wants to be close to him, in a way you have never wanted to be close to another person before in the whole of your life. 

You pat yourself dry with the sleeve of your sweater and unlock the door. As it swings open, you see Napoleon waiting outside for you. He’s adjusting the cuffs of his sleeves and looks up with feigned surprise, eyes wide for a moment while he studies you. “Fancy seeing you here,” he quips, as if he did not deliberately come here to shake you up. 

You stand motionless with your hands clutched into fists at your sides, heart pounding. “What are you _doing here_?” you hiss fiercely. 

He raises an eyebrow, the corner of his mouth quirking up into a not-quite smile, and you want to hit him, you want to put him up against the wall, you want to warn him that he needs to stop playing games with you, or else. You jam your hands into your pockets, not trusting yourself, and he steps past you into the bathroom. “I’m merely waiting for the urinal, Peril, is that a _crime?_ ”

Of course it is not, so you have nothing to say to him. You glare and stomp out into the cramped hallway, shooting a look over your shoulder at him because you cannot help it, you are compelled to look at him the way everyone else is, the way insects are drawn to land on hot, naked lightbulbs. 

He is holding the door open with his back, standing with his lips pursed thoughtfully, a line through his forehead as he arches both brows to scrutinize you from beneath them. Then, he gestures inside the bathroom with a single hand, as if beckoning for you to follow him. “Coming?” he asks lightly. 

You bite the inside of your own lip hard enough it stings. “No,” you snap, trying to look affronted, like you are appalled he would even ask such a thing. 

He nods curtly, casting his gaze back to his sleeves, which he resumes straightening. He rubs his thumb over the gold of his left cufflink, as if rubbing a smudge from the surface, in the careful way he always does careless things. It makes you ache, and you wish you could keep walking, you wish you could tear away from the spectacle of Napoleon Solo adjusting his suit jacket in a bathroom you have the option of joining him in. “Are you quite sure?” he asks. 

“Yes,” you say. You must say it, you must leave this hallway, this restaurant, Chinatown, all of San Francisco, unscathed. One bullet graze is enough, and you are terrified of what he could do to you, what he _will_ do to you because you know what he does, you have seen him toy with hundreds of people before you. The careful way he always does careless things.

“Alright then,” he says, narrowing a single eye and shouldering his way into the bathroom. He winks, and you know in this moment you have lost. You haven’t convinced him that you’re appropriately stunned by his proposition, he tells you _alright, then, but he is really saying, then why are you still standing there?_

You wrench your feet up from where they feel rooted to the ground and walk back to the table on stiff legs. Napoleon’s empty seat should not make you feel sick, nor should the way his stained napkin is strewn across his plate, his chopsticks resting mere inches away from your own place setting, as if he set them there on purpose. You think of the careful way he does careless things, appetite gone, fists clenching, unclenching.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whooo! Sorry everyone. This story is nearly complete but life got really busy and I had to take a short break, but here's a short chapter for you to read in the meantime while I get myself organized! Hopefully California will stop burning down soon, because it kind of puts a damper on my ability to write and post and update and all that Enjoy!

Illya ignores you for nearly the entire 13-hour flight from San Francisco to Cologne, and you suppose you deserve that. You sit with your knees crossed, feeling cramped and uncomfortable because it’s been a very long time since you flew coach, peering from behind your sunglasses in what you hope is a nondescript fashion across the aisle at Illya. 

He’s bunched up, too much man for too little plane, arms crossed and face a perpetual grimace. You love him even like this, sullen and icy, and perhaps you should have noticed when it began happening in Rome, in Istanbul, in France, when you dragged him into the Louvre and cursed it for housing no art more lovely than him. You should have noticed, and perhaps you did. But before it wrenched you apart, before it _bruised_ too agonizingly for you to ignore, it was just a curious thing, a novelty. You adore novelties, you covet them and steal them and pocket them for later, and it was a terrible, foolish mistake to assume _love_ was like any other novelty. Fleeting and doomed to rust. 

Now it festers and is impossible to ignore. What’s worse is that you can’t do a thing about it. You can’t cut it from your body; you can’t drink away the infection. You can’t even invite him into restaurant bathrooms to fill the ever-growing void of longing with something disguised as meaningless sex. You can’t do a thing but steal glances at Illya from your spot on the plane, wondering what he’s thinking, if he’s condemning you, or himself. He stares pointedly at the folded tray in the seat in front of him, refusing to look at you, mouth pressed into a flat, bloodless line. 

Gaby sits to your right, narrowing her eyes as she peeks over the wide white plastic rims of her own sunglasses. “What did you do to him?” she asks at some point, voice high and casual in the way that belies she’s onto something. She crunches a mouthful of complimentary peanuts, then takes a sip of orange juice. You raise an eyebrow, stunned that you feel so genuinely _fond_ of someone who is eating airline peanuts and orange juice together, the same someone who was too liquored up last night to remember what you did or did not do to Illya Kuryakin in Chinatown. You are similarly stunned that you very nearly _did_ do something to Illya Kuryakin in Chinatown, the other someone you are inexplicably, inconveniently, genuinely _fond_ of. You shake your head, lost and irritated and more than a little astonished because this is not the way you structured your identity, this is not how you can remain safe, protected, unfeeling. 

“What did _I_ do to him? Are you suggesting his moodiness was brought about by an honest-to-God _reason_? Because I’ve observed little consistency when it comes to his brooding.” 

She shrugs, sitting back and making a face. “I am suggesting you might have something to do with it, yes. He’s made eye contact with me today, at least. But not you.”

You shrug, cocking your head. “I’m not a charming little thing in Chanel wedges,” you tell her. 

She snorts, decidedly turning away from you and pillowing her head on her arms, bedding down against the window for the long flight. “You think I don’t notice,” she mumbles, “but I do.” 

As Gaby pretends to sleep, you chew thoughtfully at the inside of your cheek, the bullet graze on your arm aching in time with your wretched, unsteady heartbeat. You wonder if this thing she has just insinuated, the dance you and Illya are clumsily puzzling your way through, is not as covert as you may think. That the mask you’ve fashioned for yourself, reflective and streamlined and strategically cavalier, may not fit you as snugly as you had hoped. 

It’s tiresome, being Napoleon Solo. You clothe yourself in cruelty, you play your hand as if you have a royal flush, even when you know you’re losing. That way, at least you’re the only one who knows you don’t have a single thing to bet on. 

The hardened exterior freezes onto your flesh, almost indistinguishable from the true you to the point where even when you’re alone with yourself, you struggle to parse the persona from the person. You _believe_ yourself on most days, believe that love is nothing but a game and a drama, believe that you do not and cannot care for another human. So, of course, it’s so terribly inconvenient when you do. You can only believe yourself up until a point, until Gaby mixes peanuts and orange juice in front of you, and you don’t cringe, until Illya steals your heart just when you were convinced you didn’t have a heart to steal. 

You flick your eyes across the aisle, to the tight, hunched skyline of Illya’s shoulders, this fortress built up against your insistent and increasingly graceless attempts at invasion. You’ve all but offered yourself to him, only to be met with confusing half-resistance, the flickering hesitance of an unbroken horse yearning toward an outstretched palm it cannot trust. 

You think of feral animals, the wild fever in their eyes. You think of the dude-ranch ride all those years before, how you had to approach wild, mistrustful mounts with averted eyes, nonthreatening body language, your shoulders soft and gaze cast upon burnt earth. It had been hard for you. It wasn’t your usual posturing, the easy, self-assured way you took up space with a confidence fashioned and feigned for so many years it had become something not only real but alive. 

With flight risks, you had to go in on your knees. You are _trying_ to approach Illya on your knees, you feel as if you are crawling, begging. He is vulnerable, and you must meet such vulnerability with your own; it’s the only gambit that makes sense. But now, as you watch him, you realize that you’re at fault for even thinking of it as a gambit. You don’t know _how_ to be vulnerable. The costume you wear every day has fused with the skin beneath, leaving you nothing but hard edges, even when you try to soften yourself, move slowly, speak in whispers. 

You look away, aching with a messy, aimless longing, a vulnerability locked so tightly away you can’t even begin to find a key, cannot begin to slide your fingers between adhered layers and peel them away to dab at blood underneath. You feel Illya’s eyes burn into you, watching you as you had been watching him. You wonder what he’s thinking, if he’s condemning you, himself. You wonder if he’s approaching you on his knees, and you can’t even tell because the world looks so distorted through the smudged fractals of the mask you must peer through, day in, day out. 

\---

Cologne is much warmer than San Francisco this time of year, so you are woefully overdressed when you arrive, sweating beneath your leather jacket, your wool turtleneck, your undershirt. Outside the airport, you wait for the taxi Waverly sent for you, arms crossed over your chest while you try not to watch Napoleon shrug off his jacket and undo his cufflinks so that he can roll the sleeves of his shirt up. You fail, drawn in as you always are, gaze caught on the beads of perspiration shining at his temple, the way the pale blue of his shirt is darkened in the ditches of his elbows. You are weak from having spent 13 hours on a plane with him, and you stare, angry in all sorts of nameless, tangled ways. 

Over and over again, you think of him standing in the open doorway of a dingy, too-small bathroom in Chinatown, hair so oiled it shone under the florescent bulbs. Over and over, you think of his voice, so deliberately smooth around the words, _Coming? Are you quite sure?_ You remember the glint of his wink, blue glass reflecting blue fire, a show for you, and you’re left wondering why his nonchalance wounds you so much, hurts even to _recall_ , like hot water over a raw burn. 

You are not the sort of man who should be hurt by such things. You have been trained to withstand torture methods courtesy of the KGB in preparation for interrogation, you have learned to take pain silently, stoically. The urge to clutch at your chest when you recall Napoleon Solo’s absurd, mocking wink makes no sense. You are ashamed of it, try to drown it in fury instead. It’s easier to be angry at Napoleon’s lack of sincere regard for you, for _anything_ , than it is to interrogate why you so desperately crave it. 

The sun beats down on your back, a baking, insistent heat that is almost nauseating after the fog in San Francisco, the air-conditioned chill of the plane. Wiping sweat from your upper lip with the sleeve of your sweater, you notice the smell of stale air and cigarette smoke still clinging to the fibers and decide that you are at least grateful for this new country, this change in scenery. 

After U.N.C.L.E. took the bait and followed the decoy through Chinatown, after Napoleon shot Wilson and bled in an alley dusted in fine droplets from the fog, T.H.R.U.S.H. slipped away as it so often does. The agents working alongside the Chinese syndicate managed to escape on a plane to Cologne, so here you are. Close behind but not close enough. There is work ahead of you, and you’re more than ready to throw yourself headlong into it; you want to pull triggers and cut wires and commit to becoming mechanized in the line of duty. You want to do any number of things, as long as they provide you a reprieve from the ache of wanting Napoleon Solo in ways you cannot even begin to articulate let alone have, wanting things he he cannot offer. 

The taxi rolls up to the curb, and Waverly is inside, suit crisp, mouth unsmiling. Napoleon reaches for the door, holding it open with one hand, his jacket in the other. “Coming, Peril?” he says to you after Gaby collapses into the backseat and scoots to the window. Your heart flings itself up into your throat; your stomach plummets straight down into the street at this word that has suddenly become loaded. You don’t look at him as you push past the door and into the taxi, lowering yourself again into a machine built too small to comfortably fit you. _Coming?_ you repeat internally, insides knotted with resentment. _Are you quite sure?_

He follows, and you can feel the damp warmth from his body, you can smell his aftershave. His thigh is pressed casually against yours in the backseat, and perhaps he does not notice, but you do. You pull away from him, cheeks burning as you wonder what it is exactly that Napoleon Solo wants from you. Is it merely a rise, a reaction, a twitch in your temple? The satisfaction of knowing you work like a clock, that you tick when wound up and flip tables when smug, beautiful strangers insult your mother? Or does he want a meaningless fuck in a filthy bathroom so that he can pat himself on the back for bedding a Russkie, and a _man_ at that?

Whatever it is, you are certain it pales in comparison to what it is that _you_ want from him, that it would shrink in horror were you to allow the depth of your desire to show, to scald his skin. It boils inside you, black with shame, and you wonder if he has any idea at all what he’s done to you. 

It is not something you can run from, but it is at least something you can temporarily compartmentalize and ignore, bury beneath the mission. You are distantly relieved that this particular affair is not over, that there are new orders to adhere to in favor of adhering to Napoleon. You’re so tired of resisting his advances, exhausted by his magnetic pull, perhaps you can wrench yourself free if there’s something else to hold you fast. Waverly is not happy that the team lost T.H.R.U.S.H. in San Francisco, and as a result, you are collectively tense, on guard. The pressure should be enough to drag you from the tar pits inside you, away from Napoleon and his brilliant, terrible smile, the hook he is chasing you with, standing with his arms open, mouthing a silent, meaningless _Coming_? 

You fix your gaze to the window, away from this infernal tightness, this infernal heat, and will the thud of your heart to slow.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More of this! In which we draw ever nearer to something breaking. Thank you everyone whose been reading and reviewing, and always thank you to my wonderful beta Hurdy Gurdy, who is more encouraging than I deserve.

You’re off your game. The T.H.R.U.S.H. agent heading the mission is a tall drink of water, miles of legs in nude nylons, coifed blonde hair like a honeysuckle atop her head. You saw her once in San Francisco, followed her down the street with your eyes the way you would any girl who was six feet tall with pearls flashing around her neck. You looked twice, even. Now you’re kicking yourself for not realizing what T.H.R.U.S.H. was doing, all that they were hiding in plain sight. 

You follow her through the streets of downtown Cologne, knock into her from behind so that she stumbles in her red spiked heels and drops the briefcase she’s carrying. She’s far too adept an agent to let it swing open and scatter the contents, but you sink to your knee to help her gather her things anyway, hands brushing over hers deliberately. You note her ring, gold embossed with the sharp-beaked head of a bird. “Terribly sorry, miss,” you say, head bent so she does not see your face and connect it to the man her decoy shot in San Francisco. 

“Napoleon Solo,” she sighs, proving your efforts to be futile. _Damn_ , you think, even though you suspected as much. She makes a sound like a purring cat, a trilling of her tongue against her teeth as she beholds you, on your knees upon the sidewalk. 

You look up at her with mock submission, since you’re already here. “At your service,” you add, nodding. 

“Magda Krieghoff,” she says, standing and shouldering the strap of her briefcase. “You know, I’ve heard about you, about U.N.C.L.E. Some say that your little organization is a formidable enemy and that you are a dangerous agent. Too handsome to resist, undeniably charming, the whole package, but now that I am seeing you in the flesh...I think maybe they were wrong.”

“Reality always disappoints when you’ve heard nothing but the legend,” you tell her, offering your arm after standing. “But there’s something to be said about a reputation that becomes legend, don’t you think?” 

She purses her lips, like she can tell you’re trying to be clever, but is not moved. You feel pitied, which in turn makes you feel affronted, so you speak before she does. “Walk with me, Magda,” you say. 

She regards you for a moment, then shrugs, alighting her white tipped nails upon the crease of your elbow, and together you turn and stride down the street arm in arm. Illya is watching from a coffee shop on the adjacent block, and you briefly scan the sidewalk to see if you can catch his eye, signal to him that you’ve found her, you’re talking, she knows who you are. You have a bug in your jacket, so the gesture is unnecessary, but looking for Illya has become something that you simply _do_ , reflexively, compulsively. It doesn’t matter how superfluous the action is, you look for him always, before you even _realize_ you are looking for him. 

He blends indistinguishably with the bustle of people, so you must flick your attention back to Magda, to her painted red lips and thin, drawn-on eyebrows, lest she wonder what you’re staring at, who you’re trying to find. “I’m not yet sure you disappoint, Mr. Solo. You’re shorter in person than I imagined, however. And I can’t say I’m impressed with U.N.C.L.E. You took the bait right off our hook, and left us plenty of time to gather the operation and relocate. Are you even sure you’ll find what you’re looking for in Cologne, or have you considered I might just be another decoy?” 

You cock your head, patting her hand gently where it rests upon your arm. Your index finger grazes the thrush silhouette engraved into her ring. “Now, I wouldn’t be the Napoleon Solo you’ve heard so much about if I told you what we’ve considered, would I? I have to keep you guessing about _some_ things, Magda.” 

She arches a brow, eyes widening into bemused circles. “Indeed,” she says. 

You swallow thickly, well aware that you are reading a script but not acting. You’re _off_ , you’re flirting and laying it on as thickly as you always do and touching her cool, narrow hands with warmth and certainty, but there is none of your usual magic behind it, there is not even _conviction_. You watch opportunities to lean closer to her pass you by, untapped potential you fail to seize. You watch her size you up just as you are sizing her up, you watch your attempts to charm or at least pique curiosity fall flat, nudging up against her weakly like water lapping at the edge of a wading pool. You are, for some reason, falling short of your usual tidal waves, you are failing to drown, failing to leave her gasping and dripping and blinking salt from her eyes. 

It is a peculiar problem, and you’re not used to having it. You can think of a few women you could not impress, women who preferred the company of other women and incidentally found you laughable, boring. Women who knew who you were and kept a safe distance from you, too cautious to get pulled in. 

But Magda Krieghoff is hanging on your arm, she is leaving perfume on your suit. She is T.H.R.U.S.H., but that shouldn’t matter, it has never mattered before. There is no reason for you to be so clumsy and unconvincing around her, save for the obvious, which is that this is a problem on _your_ end. That Illya has ruined you in more ways than you realized, that he has stolen more from you than you heart. You shake your head, as if doing so will dispel the haze of incompetence. 

You stumble down the street and straight into the arms of two other T.H.R.U.S.H. agents. Their grips bite fiercely into your biceps as Magda easily hands you over, mouthing _Napoleon Solo_ to her men as she saunters away, briefcase in hand. She does not even shoot you a parting look over her shoulder. “Gentlemen,” you sigh, wincing as one digs his thumb into the still tender wound on your arm. You suppose that you should have expected this. 

They steer you toward a nearby van, and you wait for Illya to follow. 

\---

You’re off and running before you even see the other agents. Napoleon is _ridiculous_ , he’s following the glinting lure with her red lips and gold hair exactly as T.H.R.U.S.H. wants him to, and you’re not even sure he knows it’s a trap, _cares_ it’s a trap. You hate him purely for a moment as you sprint down the street, murmuring half-apologies in broken German to the people you bump into as you tear after him. You hate him for turning every mission into a honeytrap, you hate him for being so vain and so stupid that he simply _trusts_ his methods will work with T.H.R.U.S.H., an organization that has a file on him containing his weakness, a file likely detailing that he finds the bait of being irresistible irresistible bait. Your heart pounds with hating him; you run like an animal, dress shoes pinching as they slam against pavement. 

You round a corner just in time to see Magda Kreighoff deposit Napoleon straight into the hands of two men in T.H.R.U.S.H. uniforms. Red flickers across your vision, dark like clotted blood before it’s replaced by white, and whatever hate you feel for Napoleon ceases feeling pure and uncomplicated. It curls in on itself, barbed with thorns as it shreds your formerly tidy self-concept, a man with nothing to hide beneath his mask, no seed buried in soil, no layers, no interior. 

You sweep in easily and get the man to Napoleon’s right in a chokehold. He’s caught off guard and stumbles, grip weakening as he squabbles at your forearm, and it gives Napoleon just enough purchase to twist out of his grip, and use his free hand to strike the other man’s face with a flat, fierce palm. He crumples, a torrent of blood pouring from his nose, and then Napoleon turns his attention toward Magda and her suitcase, a glimmer of blonde and red not yet lost ahead of them, like a spec of blood in sewage.

Napoleon shoots you a look over his shoulder before he takes off running. Just an aching flash of blue, and you feel a reflexive, agonizing fist tighten between your ribs in response to his gratitude, his attention. There is no wink as he looks at you, no smoothness or suaveness or oil to make him shine. Just a smudge of another man’s blood above his brow, a pantomime of your own scar, and you blink as your pulse thuds in your ears, deafening. As you knock the T.H.R.U.S.H. agents out and drag them laboriously into their van, depositing them in a heap, you think about how very much you love seeing Napoleon like that. 

Undone, truth flickering on the planes of his face like the glint of bone showing through a ruin of flesh.

\---

You manage to sneak up behind Magda, catlike and quiet, and lift the briefcase from her arms like a pickpocket snatching a wallet.. You turn on your heel and easily lose her in the crowd. The street is too populated for her to make a scene, so you disappear easily, blending in, becoming invisible. It’s just a trick you learned from your thieving days disguised as good old-fashioned spy work, but you are remarkably pleased with yourself anyway. It feels like redemption, especially following your spectacular failure with Magda only moments earlier. 

The briefcase has been secured, and that means you don’t have anything to do but enjoy Cologne until Waverly reviews the documents enclosed and sends the team his next set of orders. 

There are many things you could do with this unexpected time; Cologne is a lovely city, and Gaby is already making lists of wine shops she wants to visit. She’s already told you about a marketplace where you can pick out a pig, and they will butcher it there for you, on the spot. You are, however, quite sure that the only way you’re interested in spending your evening is getting drunk enough to forget about other recent failures, certain things you cannot otherwise dispel from your mind: Illya’s eyes, wide and stricken in the doorway of that bathroom in San Francisco. Illya’s tender fingers on your still tender skin, the ache of the bullet graze, which may or may not be infected. You are shaken from this afternoon; this new version of yourself that can only go through the motions of seducing women but has no true power over them, over himself. 

You buy a bottle of vodka at a liquor store on the same block as your hotel, jaw set tight.You’re planning on drinking the whole thing yourself, but Illya takes the bottle from you in the elevator, knuckles brushing against the cuff of your sleeve in the process. “Good brand,” he says. 

“For a man who drinks so little, you care so much,” you say, and it comes out sounding sad, tired, perhaps even a little bitter. You cock your head, astounded by the tenor of your own voice, all that’s seeping through the careful white bandage you keep taped over the wound of your mouth. 

Illya shrugs. “Most drink is not worth caring for. But I occasionally make exceptions.” 

Your eyes flash to him, sudden and hot because you’re not sure if he’s speaking exclusively about vodka, or if something else is staining his words. You’re not sure of anything. On another day, with another man, you might raise your eyebrow and take a step closer, dancing around what may have been said or unsaid, pushing on the potential for innuendo to see if it gives, collapses. You no longer know how to proceed with Illya, however, so you just wrinkle your forehead deliberately, thinking that you have a headache, and how you will drink that away, too. 

“You’re welcome to some of this,” you offer, gesturing to the vodka, which looks as innocent as water in its clear glass bottle. “It probably won’t take very much for me to achieve the desired level of idiocy, anyway.” 

“I didn’t know you ever fell short of achieving idiocy,” Illya says, the corner of his mouth almost smirking, and you want to hit him, you want to shove him up against the mirrored wall of this elevator and bite that ghost of a smile off his mouth. 

“Well,” you mumble, rubbing your temples with your free hand, wincing because this is too much; you’re sick of this tiny mirrored room reflecting you and Illya infinitely, so many smaller, broken copies of yourself, some of which blend effortlessly into his, fragmented and hybridized versions of your combined images “We all fall short of something,” you say. Then, because at least in this moment you feel like you have nothing to lose, “I wouldn’t mind company tonight, if you approve of the brand.”

He shrugs again, hands jammed in his pockets, eyes obscured by his sunglasses. You can’t read him any better now than you could in the early days of your uneasy partnership, back when you couldn’t tell what exactly would set him off, back when he kept _surprising you_ , even when your whole identity revolved around unflappability. 

The door opens, and you are relieved to escape so many mirrors. 

He holds his arm out, says, “After you, Cowboy,” before following you to your hotel room, quiet footsteps on ugly plush carpeting, his head bent in an unassuming fashion, a solitary line of black traced behind you as if with a calligraphy pen. 

You try to bite back surprise, but it feels permanently lodged in your throat.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The chapter you've (maybe) been waiting for! Though it might be most angsty than satisfying, we'll see. Thanks for reading, and again a huge thank you to HurdyGurdy for being the most wonderful beta and cheerleader and friend <3

It’s dark, and you’re drunk and sitting on the floor of Napoleon’s hotel room with a flushed face and your shoes kicked off, and nothing about this scenario is self-preservative, nothing about it is even _safe_.

You’re too warm, but you aren’t wearing anything beneath your sweater, so you can’t take it off. Instead, you perspire under the scratch of wool, watching Napoleon, who has already stripped down to his undershirt, sprawl loosely across the couch and pour you both another finger of vodka. He puts his feet up on the table, so purely, indulgently American, and you swallow the shot with a skin-crawling shudder. It burns on the way down, and you know you really should stop drinking if you want to look back on this evening with anything other than a choked, stultifying self-recrimination, but you’re not certain you do. Your desire to share space with Napoleon Solo has grown so that it drowns out your other desires. Your desire to save yourself, to emerge from his orbit with your dignity intact. 

You cough and set your glass down on the coffee table, as if that will keep you from letting him refill it. Napoleon is studying you, and you cannot help but study him back in turn, the easy spread of his thighs, the flush just darkening his cheekbones, the obsidian flicker of wide, blown pupils. He has never looked so good than he does in this moment, and you’re too dizzy to stop your throat from tightening with a raw, heedless want as you drink him in.

Something must show through on your face because Napoleon tries and fails to suppress a delighted smile. “You’re drunk, Peril. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen you this drunk in all our time together.” 

“I am not drunk,” you protest. You mean to say I am not _that_ drunk but you lose the crucial word,  thus proving his point. Everything feels hazy and too warm and soft at the edges, and you know that this situation is a grave one, but you can’t remember why. You know there is usually a pain weighing you down whenever you consider your regard for Napoleon Solo, but it’s dull right now, vodka-blurred and half-forgotten. 

“You are _too_ drunk, listen to you,” he slurs, gesturing vaguely in the air in front of him. “You’re barely upright. You’re sitting on the _floor_ , for God’s sake. I bet that if we were to spar right now, even I, a frail American, would get the better of you.” He raises an eyebrow then, and warmth gathers predictably in the pit of your stomach. 

You know it is a terrible idea to spar with him right now. You’re clumsy and drunk, and you don’t trust yourself to touch him without doing something stupid, but you can’t stop yourself, you can’t make yourself want anything more than you want his drink-flushed skin under your palms, his hard edges pressed into you. “You would not win,” you scoff, making a face. “Even drunk, I am stronger than you.”

Napoleon stands, a reckless, hectic heat in his eyes. “Oh, I think you’re wrong. But of course, there’s only one way to find out.” He sets his glass down on the coffee table beside yours and carefully takes off his belt. You watch the ritual, his graceless, clumsy fingers fumbling with the buckle before he slides the leather from the loops in his pants. Transfixed, you stare, knowing he must notice the way you’re looking at him, distantly wondering if it makes him uncomfortable or only feeds his vanity. 

“Are you sure?” You mock, shifting so you’re on your knees in front of him. He sinks to his own knees, tottering a little, hair sticking up on the side where he had been resting his head against his knuckles. You imagine reaching out to smooth it down, but instead, you lose your breath to him as he barrels into you. 

It happens so suddenly. His shoulder catches you in the chest, air huffing from your lungs messily as you grapple with him on the floor, trying desperately to regain balance, a foothold, anything. Instead, you merely skid along the carpet on your back as he pushes into you, laughing breathlessly, forearm pressed into your throat. “Just say ‘U.N.C.L.E’ when you want me to let you go,” he says idly, face split into a sharp, terrible grin. 

You realize instantly that you’re in over your head. Napoleon is not stronger than you, but you’re not breathing properly, you’re too drunk and too winded and already half-hard in your trousers from the feeling of his body so agonizingly, rashly close. You suck in air, only to have it forced back out of you under Napoleon’s weight. Dizzy, your head lolls against the carpet, and you try to keep your hips from canting up off the ground and seeking him out.  

Miraculously, you manage to gain some purchase with your legs and flip him off you and onto his back, where he lands with a thud. Then you scramble on top of him, his breath all over your face, clean and fiery with vodka, and you have never wanted something inside your lungs as badly as you do right now, a want so fierce it feels like it’s splitting your chest, like your ribs will crack and your heart will spill out onto him.

The room spins around you, and somehow he twists out from under your weight easily, and you’re grappling again, slamming noisily against the coffee table, which he upends as he overpowers you. 

Somewhere in the clatter of your glasses falling, Napoleon succeeds in pinning you to the carpet quite absolutely, straddling your hips and holding your hands above your head, trapped beneath his forearm. You lie panting, broken open under his weight, sweater rucked up and face red and sweat-damp, and you _know_ the picture you must make, you know how you must look to him, weak to the point of absurdity with yearning. 

“Oh Illyusha,” he breathes, a hot exhalation ghosting so close to your face that you instinctively lick your lips. “You are _quite_ drunk.” 

It’s a name he has never called you before, and it sounds filthy in the low, slurred rasp of his voice. His eyes are too bright, too blueblack, and his breath tastes too good, and there is nothing you can do about it at all. You can feel yourself trembling with restraint and overwhelm beneath him, so you shut your eyes, turning your head so that if he dips any closer, his lips will brush against your jaw, rather than the wild, hungry part of your mouth. 

He shifts down your body very deliberately, grinding against the hard line of your cock where it’s straining against your trousers, and an explosion of static whites out behind your eyes at the slow, glorious drag of his weight. You can feel that he’s hard, too, so thick and hot against you, and you’ve never felt anything so raw and real and overwhelming. You make a noise somewhere between a groan and a sob, and Napoleon releases your shaking hands so that he can sit up, press himself against you more solidly. 

You immediately grip the leg of the couch to keep from touching him. It is somewhere near your head, and you feel crucified with your hands pinned above your head like that, but it’s better than grabbing his face between your palms and licking up into his mouth. You want to kiss Napoleon Solo so badly it’s making you crazy, but you’re not sure if it’s something that can happen here; you don’t know if it’s against the rules, or if it will break whatever is happening somehow, too much, too intimate. You don’t know how these sorts of things are supposed to work, if it means something different to kiss a man than it does to make him hard. 

As you keep yourself from touching him, he touches you. He grinds his hips into yours and pushes your sweater up over your abdominals, rubbing rough, fire-hot palms across your heaving stomach, the ladder of your ribs. “God, you’re so pale,” he murmurs, almost to himself, and you feel like you’re coming apart, like his words are a tide crashing over the shore of your body, like you’re going to finish like this, in your trousers, with nothing but the weight of his thighs spread over your body. 

You should say something, you should tell him to get off before it happens. Instead, you involuntarily arch into him, fitting your bodies together more closely, listening to his breath hitch as you grind up against his solidity. 

He spreads a palm on the stretch of skin below your navel and above your trousers, which have ridden down considerably during your fight. “When was the last time someone made you come?” he asks, thumbing over the fine trail of gold hair dusting your skin. You gasp through your teeth and wonder if he’s smiling at you. 

“I don’t know,” you answer honestly, voice all reeds and breath and thirst. 

“Will you let me?” He murmurs thickly, pushing the tips of his fingers under the waistband of your pants. “Because I will. If you want me to. Don’t let me do anything you don’t want.” 

You laugh, and it’s nothing more than a broken, humorless scuff of breath from a tight throat. Of course you _want_ , you want all of him, there is not a single thing you do not want from Napoleon Solo. It is not the absence of want that cuts at you so, it’s the terrible, shameful excess. “I want you to,” you make yourself say. 

He lets out a breath he was holding, and you groan at the raw, relieved sound of it. You pant as he braces over you with one arm, rising to his knees so that he can unbutton your trousers with the other hand. Even the shift of coarse fabric over your erection feels good because he’s the one doing it, so it feels world-ending when he actually touches your skin, his warm, heavy hand cupping your cock, palming over it firmly, certainly. An animal, involuntary sound wrenches out of you, something like a pained, strangled whine. 

He makes a fist around your length, and you have never felt anything better. You shake under him, stinging and rapturous and overwhelmed as you hide your face in the ditch of your elbow so he cannot see what he does to you, cannot see the mess to which he reduces you. Tears are leaking from your eyes, so you let go of the couch to cover them with one spread, trembling palm, teeth clenched as he fists along your cock, warm fingers and broad, sure strokes. 

Almost as soon as he begins, you finish, arching your back up off the carpet and crying out, palm smearing a mess of salt, sweat, and snot across your own face as you convulse under him. 

“Christ,” you hear him whisper, soft voice cutting through the haze of overwhelm, of dissipating static. His weight shifts over you, and you can feel his eyes burning holes in your flesh. “Illya,” he breathes. 

It hits you very suddenly, what has just happened. As soon as the static-white bliss of coming so hard fades, a terrible dread begins to clench deep in your gut. Beneath the fire of his gaze, a black mess of shame and self-loathing begins to crawl over your body. 

He leans over you, gripping your wrist gently in one loose fist so that he can pull your hand away from your face. You blink in the new light, eyes bloodshot and stinging as you squint at his reflection, blurry through the sheen of overstimulation, of tears. 

His mouth, soft and parted and perfect, dips so very close to your own. Your heart spurs into a wild frenzy, and you turn your head abruptly to the side, realizing that there are reasons you cannot let him kiss you, reasons beyond your own uncertainty. Blood pounds in your head, and you are so nauseated, so suddenly, more drunk than you have been in months, _years_ , even, spread out still beneath Napoleon Solo, your own come smeared hot and sticky across your stomach. 

Again, he tries to get close to your mouth, and again, you turn, this time managing to choke out a hoarse, “Stop.” 

Whatever had been molten and soft only moments before hardens into something cold and impenetrable as he stiffens above you. “Okay, Peril,” he murmurs. Then he peels himself off your body, spilling clumsily onto the carpet beside you before he stumbles to his feet, staggering toward the couch to collect his dress shirt, his suit jacket. “You got it.” 

Heart pounding, you allow yourself to look at him, eyes narrowed miserably in their film of confusion, of vulnerability. You watch him shrug on his jacket and pour himself another shot of vodka, profile all hard lines and a set jaw, so crisp and firm and die-cut. 

You close your eyes again and hear the muted click of his throat as he swallows his drink. 

\---

You’re still half-hard against your thigh as you stare at him there, this pathetic ruin of a man spread out on your hotel room floor, trousers around his thighs and cock softened down into its foreskin, gorgeous and red and sticky where he’s adhered to his stomach. He would taste of musk and salt and metal if you put him in your mouth right now, and you imagine doing it, just to wound yourself further. You feel like you deserve the pain though you’re not sure _why_ , not entirely certain of your crime this time, if you committed a clear transgression or if this is simply the price you pay for hurting so many before Illya Kuryakin came and made you think about what it meant to hurt people, to have feelings at all. 

Your cock twitches, so you press the heel of your hand down onto it, waiting for Illya to _do_ something. Get up, leave you. Puke vodka all over the carpet. _Something_ besides lolling around on the floor with his face in his hands, his muscles still convulsing as he rides the aftershocks of whatever you’ve just done to him. 

You knew this would happen. That if you ever _did_ get Illya here, on his back telling you he wanted you, it would last as long as it took for him to empty himself into your hand. That’s how it goes with curious men; they collapse in on themselves once they use your body to satisfy their curiosity, consumed and destroyed by guilt, homosexual panic, whatever it is. Just because _you_ somehow manage to fall in love with him doesn’t change what this is for _him_. A vile, dirty end to months of wondering what it might be like to let himself go. To let himself cave under the weight of your advances, the pressure of your want. 

And you thought you could live with that. You thought that you could endure him casting you aside once you saw this tension to its end. You knew this would happen, and you thought it would be worth it, but now as you watch him, the thoughtless sprawl of his legs and those enormous hands covering his eyes so that you cannot even begin to detect and catalogue all the shades of his regret, you wonder if you were wrong. 

You think of a horse tearing across the desert, the flash of hooves cutting into rooster tails of red sands, taking off into the distance while you nursed your fall. You recall thinking you would be _happy_ , when it happened, satisfied to have lasted all of eight seconds upon the back of an animal who did not want you there. But you underestimated the agony of broken bones.You finish off the drink you poured yourself earlier, hating the way it burns in your stomach long after you swallow. 

You try and stand, but you are so drunk, drunker than you expected, and you nearly collapse, catching yourself on the arm of the couch before levering up to your feet again. The room spins around you, and Illya says something in Russian from the floor, but you choose not to hear it. 

Staggering to the bathroom, you shut the door behind you and double over the sink, half-certain you’re going to vomit, sweat collecting in the hollows of your collar bones as you retch unproductively. Part of you wants so, so badly for Illya to come find you in this bathroom, chase you to your grave, slam his way in with elbows and shoulders and put you up against the wall, kiss you breathless. You would even take his fists, if he will not kiss you, you will take anything from him. However, it’s a part of you so young and shameful and human that it’s buried too deeply for you to find, name, give any weight. You choke a mouthful of vodka-spit into the drain, coughing, one hand braced against the edge of the counter, the other fumbling with the buttons of your pants. 

Heart racing with frantic and sudden sickness, you lower yourself onto the floor beside the toilet in case you really are going to vomit and half-heartedly jack yourself off, teeth grit, cock feeling painfully hard and too sensitive, hot and throbbing in your fist as you struggle to bring yourself off. It feels like a necessity, something certain and final to end this mess you’ve willingly flung yourself into. Something to ease the pervasive ache twisting your insides into knots of regret. 

Your skin is drawn too tightly, your palm too dry, and all you can do to finish is to think of Illya. The terrible heat of his cock in your palm, the scarred white of his chest, so fevered as you touched him. You think of his unkissed lips, his mouth split open, making such raw, desperate noises, the shine of spit at the corner of his mouth. And then you imagine licking him open, his teeth slick under your tongue as you come over your fist, socked heels sliding pathetically against tile. 

There you sit for what seems like a very long time, slumped against the edge of the tub, still twitching cock in hand, waiting for your heart to slow. 

You know you’re still drunk, but your mind at least seems deceitfully calm after your orgasm, like water icing over as the sun sets, smoothing chaos into the illusion of placidity. Eventually you find the will to tuck yourself back into your pants and stand on shaking legs. 

After splashing your face with water and washing your trembling hands, you straighten your shoulders and leave the bathroom, wearing your false propriety somewhat unconvincingly. Your eyes fall onto the upset coffee table and the vacancy beside it, throat and lungs tight as you scan the floor. You are relieved to see that Illya is gone, though it is a relief that feels as much like grief as it does anything else. 

\---

You don’t feel like you can return to your room, so you flee into the city. Cologne is balmy even in the dead of night, and nearly no one turns their head to wonder about a man that tall and straight-backed and cruel-mouthed as he stalks through the shadows, so you feel invisible in the darkness. A couple, very wrapped up in each other as they stumble down the street, cease their giggling for a moment to shoot you a glance and then cross over to the adjacent sidewalk, arms twined. Besides that, there is nothing. You walk, and no one sees you; you pause to stand with your head in your hands, and no one stops to ask you if you are all right. 

You walk and walk and walk some more, staring at the cracked cement beneath your feet, hands jammed wrist deep into your pockets. Your stomach drops every few steps, as frequent as the tide but not a fraction as steady. Even as you struggle desperately to think of anything save for what just happened, Napoleon keeps clouding your vision, forcing an unswallowable lump up into your throat so that you must choke on him. You cannot forget the way his skin smelled so close and drunk and fever-hot; you cannot forget the way he breathed your name, the way he slurred its three syllables into two. You think and you can’t stop thinking, even as you tell yourself _stop, enough, please_ , like your own mind will listen, like you have control over this beast anymore. 

Your feet begin to ache, so you collapse onto a bench at a train station, elbows on your knees, breath labored and lungs burning. _Stop, enough, please_ , you think, but still your mind is a mess of Napoleon, the broad span of his palm wrapped around you, the way he tried to pitch forward and catch your mouth in his. 

You bite the inside of your cheek until it tastes metallic, wondering why it felt so imperative in that moment to deny Napoleon your lips when you had so easily given him everything else. Inhaling raggedly, you realize that it was _because_ you gave away everything else, because you had lost, that you had to keep what you wanted most from him. If not, what was left for you? What was left to hold close to your heart, while an art thief made off with the rest of you? 

_Stop, enough, please_ , you think, but louder than that is his voice echoing inside you, assuring, _I will, if you want me to. Don’t let me do anything you don’t want._

You make fistfuls of your own hair and tug, so that there’s an excuse for the sting in your eyes, the thickness in your throat. You want everything from Napoleon Solo, a limitless hunger for him blooms inside of you, and he is the exact sort of man who gives nothing, the exact sort of man who guards himself against such awful, smothering love. 

You wonder if you have driven him away. If he will try to touch you ever again, or if you damaged his ego, gave him the false impression of disinterest, disgust. If disgust and disinterest are even things that drive away men like Napoleon Solo, or if you have only increased your value in his eyes, a piece of art that doesn’t want to want him but does anyway. You know he only covets you for superficial reasons, and you are uncertain if tonight’s affair will make you more of a novelty to Napoleon, or if he has gotten all that he wants from you and is bored with the prospect of anything further. You remember the hard lines of his face, the way he rolled off you uncertainly and disappeared into the bathroom, an indecipherable blot of ink, a thief and a gambler and a liar, and you cannot read him, you cannot trust a spy. 

With your head cradled in your palms, you decide that for the sake of your well-being, his, and U.N.C.L.E. as a whole, this should never happen again. However, even as you resolve to keep him at arm’s length, you know full well that if the opportunity ever arises again, you will likely not have the willpower to turn the other cheek if he tries to steal your breath. 

\---


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More! Eternal thanks to Hurdy Gurdy, worlds most wonderful beta, especially on this section which was particularly difficult for me to write. Enjoy!

You and Illya do not speak of that night again. In fact, you speak of little else beyond that which is professionally required of you for the rest of the mission, and although your chest feels permanently crushed with the ache of loss, it is at least so constant an ache you almost grow accustomed to it. Sometimes you steal glances at Illya in vain attempts at gauging where he stands with you, but he always averts his eyes, something flickering in the tight line of his jaw like the threat of violence, so you retreat. You are not resigned to losing him entirely and hope--dearly hope--that after some time has passed, he will at least look at you again. Hope is weak, however, weak and dangerous, so you avoid engaging in it _too_ consciously. 

The Cologne mission wraps up neatly and anticlimactically, so Waverly sends the team to Honduras directly afterward, where a number of particle physicists from around North America have mysteriously “moved” following abrupt, unexpected “retirements.” The stewardess on the plane is curvy and flirts unabashedly with you, false lashes lowered to half-mast as she tells you to come find her personally if you need _anything_ else. You take it upon yourself to do just that, and when you land in Honduras some hours later, her taste on your tongue, you feel as if you might survive this storm you brought down upon yourself after all. 

The sun is hot and cruel in Honduras, and Illya spends an afternoon staked out on the roof of a power plant, observing suspicious comings and goings with his sleeves rolled up. He returns with his forearms and the bridge of his nose badly burnt. Gaby laughs herself to tears at him. You tease him as much as is appropriate, but you also imagine digging your fingers into the burn, the ensuing white indents your touch would leave, the rush of blood filling the vacancies you pressed into him. You imagine the heat of his skin under your lips, you imagine how terrific the contrast would be between his pale chest, his red arms smoothing into gold. You love him still, so much so that you cannot even soothe yourself by thinking about the stewardess’s slim tan legs twined around your waist, her hair wilting from its Ronette swoop as her head fell forward against your shoulder. You are broken and resentful and decide that flesh, not your own, not Illya’s, is the only cure for such a disease. 

For the duration of the mission, every time Illya irritates Gaby, she reaches for his arm and smacks his sunburn. It makes him jumpy, suspicious of the both of you as if you are in on their game even though this time you’re _not_ , you’re sick of games for once in your life and don’t have the energy to do anything beyond masking how painful it is to exist around Illya while knowing the sounds he makes when he comes. Flesh and more flesh, like digging at a scab with dirty fingers. 

Still, you carry on. Your smiles have always been false and infrequent so this shouldn’t feel different, this mask shouldn’t fit any more imperfectly than any of your others. You find Honduran women to take to bed on the nights you are not undercover or working, you cringe each time they breathlessly croon out the name of your alias into the damp hollow of your neck. You feel unsure of who you are, as if you’re not used to answering to a variety of names, as if you’re not used to being a variety of people. 

The red of Illya’s arms browns over in a few days, but you suspect it is still tender as you lie awake in a hotel bed, a halo of dark hair strewn about your pillow, perfume in your sheets. 

\---

Napoleon fucks a stewardess named Martini, and you are grateful she has an absurd name so that Gaby does not think too much about the way you scoff at it, at Napoleon with lipstick on his collar, wiping his perfect mouth on the cuff of his jacket as he falls back into the seat beside you. You remind yourself that his mouth is not yours, none of him is, and he can fuck whomever he likes, whether or not they’re named Martini. 

Still, you are powerfully jealous. It is the kind of jealousy that makes you sick, twists your stomach into something so misshapen and unrecognizable that it’s difficult for you to eat, to stand upright. You hate Napoleon, and you hate Martini for making you _physically_ ill over something as ridiculous as it is fruitless. Being _jealous_ that your partner, whose _job_ it is to charm women out of their dresses and into his arms so effortlessly that secrets seep out in the process, fucked a stewardess named Martini. It’s unfair, as unfair as if you had been jealous that Napoleon went to the shooting range to practice his aim. 

Except that you probably _would_ be jealous if he were to go to the shooting range to practice his aim; you would be jealous of the gunmetal under his palms, burning his fingers as he paused to reload, anything he touches intentionally and meaningfully that is not your skin.The realization hits you like ice water, in all its base, naked glory. It’s preposterous, to be jealous of Martini or a theoretical gun. Yet still, the feeling burns inside you, sick and hot in your solar plexus, reflexive and true. 

You are, in some shameful, well-buried layer of yourself, jealous of anything or anyone who captures his attention.Your want is well out of your control; you know this. There is no logic or reason curbing it, no bridle in the mouth of its wild rage. The terrible, comical excess almost soothes the horror you would otherwise have for yourself at being jealous of a woman named Martini, someone Napoleon will likely never see again. 

In Honduras, you spend the idle time you have watching a very boring power plant baking beneath the raw sunlight and contemplating the nature of your jealousy, your pain. You think that this want has grown unchecked in you at least in part because Napoleon is a man and your partner and a number of other things that do not fit neatly into a single category, that certainly do not exist harmoniously with the stupid, messy illogic of _love_.

If Napoleon were simply some woman you had fallen in love with, even _Gaby_ , who is also your partner but not a man, you would expect jealousy because you would expect exclusivity. It is something written into the narrative of loving women, along with marriage and commitment and possession. 

But, of course, there is no prewritten narrative to follow with Napoleon, no love story, no life path, no rules or protocols. Loving him happened without you realizing it, wild and unlikely, a vine of wildflowers cropping up in the cold, urban splay of concrete in your chest. You simply love him. Love him beyond logic, beyond reason, and that is all. Even if he wanted you back and there was some potential for a future with him, you could never expect or even demand exclusivity. It is not as if you could _marry_ him; it’s not like you live in a world where you could belong to a man, as you wish to belong to Napoleon Solo, it’s not as if you live in a world where you can even really _love him_ as you do without shame, danger, complication. There’s no guideline for you to follow, so the wildflowers grow and grow, consuming all that exists around them, twining, overtaking the soil they were born from. It’s a messy garden, one of weeds, of thorns. 

You cannot be anything more to Napoleon than what you already are. All that you want from him that exists outside of partner, colleague, or even tentative friend is impossible. Nameless and forbidden and silenced. You cannot even resign yourself to being his gun, warm and oiled between his palms as he shoots, absorbing the shock of your recoil. Instead you are doomed to a future of unfounded jealousy, longing to be any of the things he touches: Napoleon’s pistol, his wineglass, a stewardess named Martini with glowing gold skin and false eyelashes and hair like an oil slick. 

Martini is one of many. You want to hate them all, every woman you see sidle out of Napoleon’s hotel room before dawn, straightening their blouses and holding their heels over their shoulder as they pad barefoot down the hall, blushing and satisfied. Instead, you only hate yourself for noticing, for aching. 

You try not to think too much of any of it, but unfortunately, it is all you can think about.

You wonder if Napoleon thinks of that night in Cologne, if he remembers you saying _I want_ with all the crystalline certainty of a field of wildflowers grown over the whole of a city. Or you wonder if he simply sees you as one of many, this parade of flesh leaving his hotel room as the sun pushes up over the horizon, so much skin blending together beneath his, a haze of indiscriminate pleasure, pieces on a game board, all shining with sweat. 

 

\---

You finish up in Honduras and celebrate afterward. It was a slow, boring mission, and everyone is relieved it’s over, but you are mostly relieved for an excuse to drink, an excuse to be anything save for tightly wound and supremely polished around Illya Kuryakin, who can’t stand you lately. Illya and his burnt arms, his perpetual expression of disapproval, which he shoots at you nearly every time you try and catch his eye. 

You suspect he suspects you of spending more than one night with more than one woman this mission, and he’s not wrong. You used to think Illya was a prude about sex, gentile and proper and refusing himself the pleasure of ever caving to true want, but he proved that assumption wrong some weeks ago, under you in Cologne. Now, when he looks at you, temple pulsing and jaw tight with stern disgust, you have to wonder exactly where it comes from. Does he truly believe himself when he tries to appear as if he finds your habits revolting, or is there self-aware self-hatred woven into his glare? Is he trying to forget Cologne by pretending he’s above meaningless fucks on lonely nights, above wanting things that are stupid and ill-advised and _bad_ for him? Has he _already_ forgotten Cologne? 

Whatever it is, you know you’re only perceiving it in fragments. Illya is your blind spot, and you feel _especially_ blind right now, blind in the Honduran sun, blind with mourning all the things you cannot have because, of course, you have a heart that fashioned feeling for a cold, repressed, self-denying Russian man who will not let himself want you, who drinks to forget you, just as you must drink to forget him. 

However, you have only _begun_ to drink when the night takes a turn for the unexpected. You’re trying to teach Gaby cribbage, but she’s falling asleep and drinks faster and harder than you do, her cheeks pink and chin nodding toward your chest as you try to explain the rules to her for the fifteenth time. Illya hovers somewhere behind you both, fiddling in vain with the broken record player, a giant hunching in a chair several sizes too small for him. 

Gaby’s forehead almost hits the table. “Goodness,” you say, reaching for her shoulder and pushing her upright, using your other hand to snap your fingers under her nose. She narrows her eyes at you, clearly feeling condescended to. “No wonder you can’t retain anything I’m saying, you’re only half-awake.” 

“And whose fault is that?!” she says with a yawn, pouting. “That girl you had last night was a screamer. I had to put a pillow over my head, but even then I could still hear her. _More! More!_ In her stupid silly accent...what was she, French? Italian?” 

You cock an eyebrow, splaying your fingers across your chest, falsely affronted. “Dutch. You’re really abominable with accents, Teller. And if you found her _so_ intolerable, you could have always--”

Illya stands so abruptly and violently his chair topples over. You and Gaby both start, your own voice dying in your throat as you twist to look at him, straight back and sloped shoulders and burning cheeks, only half-visible beneath the brim of his cap. He’s radiating something hot and dangerous, and because even if you _want_ to resist your self-destructive predisposition, it bowls you over every time; you are more than intrigued. 

“I need to leave,” he says, almost to himself, voice gruff and awkward as he shuffles toward the door of Gaby’s hotel room, hands tightening into fists at his sides. You search for his telltale finger twitch, his knuckles drumming against his thigh, but he shoves his hands into his pockets before you can catalogue the subtlety of their movement. “Goodnight,” he adds, an afterthought. 

Gaby springs to her feet and shoots across the room to slap his sunburn as he lets himself out the door, but he’s anticipating it and snaps his arm out of the way, glaring at her, teeth clenched in warning. She laughs, standing on her tiptoes to pat him on the shoulder like he’s an especially huge, stupid dog. “Alright, goodbye, you awful, grumpy man,” she says to him, voice all mocking singsong. She kisses the air beneath his cheek, too lazy to stretch the extra inches it would take to actually make contact. Then she sways back to you, yawning again as Illya shuts the door behind him. “Are you going to follow him?” she asks lightly, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand so that her cheek is smeared with mascara. She looks so very small right now, a child with her soft round face and small hands and eternal pout. It’s deceiving, such sweetness when you know what she’s driving at. 

You search for a twinkle to her eye, but the light is too low in her room, and she is good at keeping you from seeing things she does not want you to see. You cock your head, wondering what Illya would do if you chase him, remembering his eyes in San Francisco, so wide and blue and stunned and terrified. “Didn’t you hear him? He needed to leave. He meant us, he didn’t mean this _room_. He’s in one of those absurd, solitary moods; he probably wants to go hide in an icebox and dream of Mother Russia,” you say, finishing off your drink even though you do not feel very much like getting drunk tonight, not anymore, not alone. 

Gaby hauls you up off her floor and pushes you out of the room with surprising but not _entirely_ surprising strength. “He didn’t mean us, he meant _you._ ” 

Your stomach clenches, then drops. Gaby may look like a child, but she is far more of a mother than she lets on, caring and observant and loyal and protective, likely watching you and Illya dance around each other gracelessly as you once watched her and Illya conduct a similar version of the same clumsy waltz. “Shouldn’t I be the last one to chase him, then?” you ask her, recovering quickly from the sting of remembering such things. 

She stands in the door frame, hip popped out in her cuffed pjs, hair tied up in a messy bun as she bats her tarry lashes at you and grins. “Now, that doesn’t sound like the Napoleon Solo I know.” 

She shuts the door in your face, and you’re left standing in the hallway without any of your liquor. You shoot your gaze down the hall and fix your eyes on Illya’s hastily retreating back, shrugging before straightening your cuffs and pretending you were heading in that direction anyway. 

\---

You need to leave; you need to get out. You’re suffocating and every inch of you feels as if it’s in knots, pulled ever tighter each measured step you take toward your room, like you’re flaying yourself to bits, pulling yourself apart. Napoleon should not make the air so hard to breathe, but he does. Napoleon Solo and the careful way he does careless things. 

His footsteps echo after you; you recognize their tenor, his weight, and freeze up. You’re horrified to realize that part of you _wants_ him to follow you, wants him to break down every door and peel away every layer until he sees what’s inside: the seed he planted grown fierce and wild and multiplied so many times over, so many new green shoots all coiling into the filigree of his name. You make a fist, ready to hit him if he tries to touch you. 

“Peril,” he says breathlessly, and you turn in spite of yourself, arm poised to strike. 

He holds his hands up, eyes wide and surprised and blue. “Gaby kicked me out; it seems my company is only valuable when coupled with yours. Where on _earth_ are you going? It’s very nearly midnight.” 

“It’s after midnight,” you say, voice clipped and irritated and almost inaudible to you, given the frantic pounding of blood in your ears. “And I am going nowhere. Go to sleep, Cowboy.” 

“No,” he says and you _loathe_ him; you long to slam him up against the dreadful terra cotta wallpaper in this hallway and shut him up, your teeth at his pulse, your tongue in his mouth, anything. You want him so, so badly your hands tremble and your throat aches and you tear your eyes away, not trusting yourself to stand this close to Napoleon Solo, to _look_ at him now that you are alone together. “Not until you tell me where you’re going,” he says. He doesn’t sound smug, but you imagine his expression is one of complacency, so you read it as such anyway. 

After struggling with the lock to your room for a few moments before it works, you’re appalled when he follows you inside, tentatively, at a distance. It’s _infuriating_ , how he pushes and pushes, how _close_ he gets when he _knows_ you could kill him if you wanted to, when he knows you once said _I want you to_ and meant it with every fiber. “Running laps,” you decide, needing somewhere to put all this terrible madness you have stoppered up inside, threatening to come raging out of your fists, leaking out of your eyes. 

“Running laps,” he says incredulously. “Where? Laps around what?” 

“Honduras,” you say, shrugging. Then, because you know him well enough to anticipate a quip, _The entire country? God, Peril, I know you’re barely human, but an entire country is ambitious, even for you_ , you add, “Puerto Cortez. I’ll run to the Port Authority construction site.” 

“I’ll come with you,” he says easily. “God knows this mission has been so dull, I feel like I’ve lost my edge. I could certainly benefit from some fresh sea air.” 

You are supposed to give him a hard time, and you would have, before Cologne. _I would invite you along, but you cannot keep up, Cowboy_ , or _What edge? You have never had an edge to lose_. But the words get lodged in your throat; speaking seems so terrifically difficult when he’s standing there in your hotel room, and you know you cannot look at him without the storm showing through your fissures, without giving him a crevice to push into. “Don’t,” is what you can finally force out. “I want to be alone.” 

“What are friends for,” he says carefully, “if not to tell us when we’re lying to ourselves?” 

It is perhaps the first time you have ever heard him refer to you as a friend with anything other than muted, lilting sarcasm, and it feels like a blade twisting between your ribs, cracking you open along a seam. You cannot stop yourself from looking at him then, gaze flicking reflexively to the terrible shape of his body, which is leaning in the doorway, casual but not nonchalant, a guarded prudence to his arms where they are crossed in front of him. You want to glare, but you can tell your eyes are pleading more than they are condemning, and you want to ask him who here is lying to himself, who here is a _friend_ , but if you could not find your voice before, you certainly cannot now. 

“It’s settled, then,” he says. “I’ll change into more suitable running attire and meet you in the lobby.” His mouth curves up into a quick, fake smile before he nods at you and leaves. 

You stand for a long time with your hands braced with white-knuckled force on the edge of your suitcase, thinking that you could, and _should_ , stay here. Lock your door and turn off the lights and let Napoleon Solo change into running clothes and wait in the empty lobby for a _friend_ who will never show up. Let Napoleon Solo find a Dutch woman to bring back to his room so that she can pray _more, more, more_ into the night while you rot in the dark, coiled around this hopeless disease. 

Instead, you shuck your trousers and pull on a pair of black sweat pants, trade your dress shoes for military boots, and take an elevator to the lobby to meet Napoleon.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I keep neglecting these updates because even LOOKING at the story and remembering I haven't finished it yet makes me anxious. But I realized I left you all hanging last time, so here's something nice for all your mid week sexy spy needs <3

You’re more out of shape than you’d like to admit, and Illya is worlds faster than you, but you don’t mind. You don’t mind watching the glorious shape of him running ahead of you, square-shouldered and straight-backed and angled and beautiful, like sculpture in motion. There’s something feral in the salty-warm air, the electricity of it making you feel acutely aware of being _alive_ as you suck in great lungfuls of the night. 

You watch Illya’s dark silhouette cut through the shadowed city, and you wonder if tonight is the night he finally turns on you, breaks your nose with his fist, and calls you a homosexual, a sodomite, fights himself through fighting you and hopefully finds some closure for the unbearable toxicity that has been brewing between you ever since you made him come in Cologne. You think that maybe, if he gets that out of his system, this will blow over. He won’t have to ask for a transfer, and you can begin reassembling your shattered fragments, collecting the broken bones strewn in the sand as he gallops off into the illusion of his sunset. 

You’re not entirely sure he wants to _fight_ you over this, but it’s a safer thing to hope for than any other possibilities, any other explanations for this wreck of tension preventing your eyes from meeting for anything beyond a few searing, gut-wrenching seconds at a time. You wonder what it will take to get his hands on you and consider that with the way he stared you down in his hotel room, all fire and fear, it will not take very much at all. 

He runs like he’s mechanized. So even and smooth and powerful, a submarine cutting silently through clear black water, and you must push yourself to catch up with him, shoes pounding the cracked asphalt road, breath burning in your lungs. 

You’re not close though to catch him, but you reach out and your fingers brush against his elbow just as it swings back toward you. He flinches, sends you a cutting look over his shoulder, and speeds up. You grit your teeth and follow, reaching again, but he is like smoke, just out of your grasp. 

Puerto Cortez’s streets grow darker and increasingly industrial as you near the construction site, a network of alley-way filigree branching off from the main coastal road, like capillaries splitting from a vein. The Honduran Port Authority looms against the night like a strange, decayed cityscape, all eerie iron scaffolding and piles of broken concrete, tall hulking shapes just beyond the rhythmic crashing of the tide. You can smell salt and sea, and you want to smell it in Illya’s hair; your cheeks are numb, and you want to warm them in the hollow of his throat. Still, you will settle for the heat of blood coursing down from your nose, the scent of copper and rot and regret. You will settle for anything as long as he gives it to you. 

You get close enough to grab his wrist, and he tries to wrench away, but you hold fast. He stumbles and so do you, both of you skidding and nearly collapsing into the road as he struggles against your grip, skin radiating a fevered heat. He pants, eyes flashing, and your heart feels like a capsizing ship as you behold him. “What are you doing?” he snaps, wrenching away from you hard. He throws you off balance so you have to let go of him to keep from sprawling out on your hands and knees, and you think you’ve lost him, you think he’s going to sprint away from you and leave you gasping here in your track suit under the glow of the Honduran moon, but he doesn’t. 

He stands there breathing hard, hands braced on his knees as he backs away, but he does not run. 

You stagger toward him, and again he evades you, this time smacking your hand away with more than adequate force. “ _What are you doing_?,” he asks again, voice snagging. 

You reach, and he pushes you with his hands, but his feet stay rooted to the pavement, splayed and grounded in a sparring stance. “Is that what you want?” you ask him breathlessly, stepping back into his orbit, shoving his shoulders, heaving chest brushing up against his as you get closer, too close, _recklessly_ close because if you kiss him, he will certainly hit you then, you remember the way he told you _stop_ , thick and ragged in his throat. “You want to fight?” 

He laughs desperately and pushes into you; you’re not expecting it so you stumble before catching yourself, rounding back in on him. You stand, chest to chest and nearly brow to brow, hearts pounding so hard you cannot tell which wild, rhythmless tattoo is coming from which ribcage. You can taste his breath on your lips, and you want the rest of him so badly you cannot fucking _stand_ it anymore, cannot make yourself pause to think and recall what it might cost you to touch him. 

You grab his forearms, and he twists away, eyes blown wide and black with pupil, fixed decidedly on your mouth. Your stomach plummets, and it crosses your mind that maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t want to fight. Or maybe he does, but he doesn’t know how to keep a fight from turning into something else. The way he’s looking at you _hurts_ , you feel so scrutinized and scrubbed raw and cut to the bone by the sublime heat of it; you have been regarded many, many times, but never like this, never in such a way that you could feel the glass of your mask cracking, the ice melting. 

“Illya,” you breathe, and he makes a terrible, animal noise in response, grimacing, showing you a white flash of teeth, and you imagine their slickness under your tongue. You grab him and back him up against the nearest wall, the cold concrete siding of some seaside warehouse. He lets you, fists raised uselessly between you, clenched tight and bloodless, and you don’t _care_ if he uses them on you, you don’t care. You know with a bone-deep conviction in this moment that you _have him_ , you have at least one searing kiss, all teeth and tongue and blood and rage, before he tries to kill you. And it may not be the smartest way to go, spitting filth and thinking _wow_ with stars in your eyes from a gutter in Honduras, but you _want_ it, and you will have it. 

You breathe all over his mouth, intentionally, deliberately. He weakens under you as you dip so close to the perfect peak of his lips, wet and parted and sucking you in reflexively as you exhale, brushing against his chin, the corner of his mouth, the cut of his cheekbone, the thin white sliver of his scar you have thought of kissing so very many times that just seeing it sends a pang of hunger straight to your gut. You give him air, and he inhales it, teeth chattering and hands trembling like he’s chilled, even as you feel great waves of heat coming from his body, on fire from running, from resisting you. You can smell his sweat, and you feel drunk, stars exploding behind your eyelids as he finally, finally grabs you, spins you, and shoves you up against the wall just as he was shoved moments before. 

Cement bites into your back, and you cry out raggedly, eyes open just long enough to see how _broken_ Illya looks as he thumbs roughly across your lower lip. He opens your mouth for you, smearing you into something wet, panting, torn, and you must shut your eyes again because he’ll be the death of you, and you can’t die before you have him, you cannot die before this kiss. 

“Illya,” you murmur, and the dam breaks. 

He kisses you like a flood. Such rage and such heat pouring into you, his breath tattered to meaningless gasps as he licks your lips apart, bites you until you’re swollen, sucks at your tongue like a parched man drinking, and you have _never_ been kissed like this, never in your life, overflowing with kisses so that all you can do is hold on to him, stunned, as he cards his hands desperately through your hair. 

You can’t breathe, and you don’t care. You lock your fingers behind his neck and nearly buckle under the way he’s touching you, broad palms so wide and hungry as they maul over your chest, shoulders, hips. Whatever he can reach, graceless and frantic like he can’t decide what he wants first, like he thinks you’re going to push him off, pull away if he gives you a moment to consider it. Eventually he anchors himself with one hand spread warm over your cheek, holding you steady as he kisses you deep and desperate, the other hand fluttering over your throat, your ribcage, down to your ass where he grabs a fistful of muscle and drags you closer, groaning brokenly into your lips. 

It is not at all what you expected. You thought if he let himself kiss you it would be over as soon as it started, his horror overtaking him and driving him to fight or at least run. But here against him, you can tell he doesn’t want to run, you can tell he doesn’t even want to stop to _breathe_. He kisses wetly down your neck and across your jaw, stubble scouring the tender skin there, rough and perfect before he’s seeking out your mouth again, tongue salty with your sweat, and you’re coming apart under him, hard against the thigh he’s pushed between your legs, rutting against him and your mind descending into a filthy haze of _please, God, please_ punctuated only by his name. You make fists in his turtleneck to keep him close, teeth in his shoulder, his lips, whatever you can reach, whatever he is offering you. _Please, God_ , you think, and then, without your control or consent, a sound wrenches out of you in a pleading whine, and you have never heard your own voice come out like that before, so full of tears and blood. 

A foghorn bleats in the distance, and you suddenly remember where you are, pushed up against a concrete wall in Puerto Cortez, just a stone’s throw away from a construction site, and there is no one around, certainly, but you want to do everything to Illya, and not everything can be _done_ in the streets of a Honduran port town. 

You smooth a trembling hand up into his hair, lips brushing the shell of his ear. “Can I take you back to my room?” you breathe, nails razing his scalp as he pulls just far enough away from your mouth to stare at you, lips swollen and eyes so full and black. He doesn’t answer at first, just pitches down into you again to kiss like kissing is air, and you have the stomach-plummeting thought that you want to push him to his knees so he can have your cock, since he’s so fucking desperate to have all of you in his mouth, sucking so hungrily at your tongue. You tug at a fistful of his hair, and he lets you go for a second, murmuring “yes” before kissing you again. 

It takes you several failed attempts to peel away from the wall--you keep grabbing each other again and collapsing into it for support--but eventually, you manage to wrench away from each other. Your breath is the only sound save for the tide, fast and uneven, and as you take off jogging after Illya, you can feel a stitch forming in your side. 

Illya is ahead, and you are several feet behind, legs impossibly weak and heart in your throat. _Don’t go, don’t change your mind_ , you repeat on a frantic loop as you run back to the hotel, blood pounding in your ears as you struggle to keep up. _Please, God,_ you pray, the desperate wish of a godless man. Several times you reach for him, but he is faster and manages to stay just ahead of you, such a perfect shape in the darkness, such a perfect stride for you to match. 

\---

 

Your hands are shaking. You stand behind Napoleon as he unlocks the door to his motel room, drinking in the wild heat radiating from his body in waves. You stand close enough to inhale the sharp, electric bite of his running sweat, which you can see cooling in the hair curled at the base of his skull, worried from your fingers. Your hands are shaking; they itch to get back on the fever of his skin, to take a fistful of that dark, damp hair so you can tug his head back onto your shoulder, expose the ridges of his throat, affix your mouth to the tremble of his pulse, and suck the salt away. The taste of him still burns on your tongue, and you want more, want it so purely you can hardly think of anything else. 

You flex your hands and brace them on your thighs, the wide plane of muscle still in tremors from jogging back to the motel room. You peer over Napoleon’s shoulder and notice that his hands are shaking, too, as he fumbles with the lock, cursing under his breath. 

Finally, the door clicks open, and he stands brusquely to the side, nodding toward the interior of the room with his head bent, his eyes cast to the floor. “After you, Peril.” 

You step inside, and he follows you in, dead-bolting the door behind you both. 

Paralyzed, you stand in the center of his dark motel room, shaking hands and rabbiting heart, wondering if it’s alright to put him back up against the wall again this instant, to resume what you had been doing back in Puerto Cortez, half-hidden under a blanket of night. You want desperately to fall back into the mad squall of teeth and tongue and fire and breath, but you’re not sure if something has shifted now that you’re back inside the civility of a motel room, away from the port, out from under the silver spill of the moon. 

Whatever this is, whether it’s sex or seduction or romance, Napoleon is more experienced, Napoleon knows the _rules_ , if there are rules to such a thing. You don’t. You only know that if he doesn’t take the lead soon, you will crumble into his sway again, ash swept up by the wind. You have limited control over your body, and you can _feel_ its wavering resolve, hunger coiled inside you like a snake, ready to rear and strike and poison him at any moment, any movement. That lack of control terrifies you, especially when Napoleon seems so _composed_ again, a far cry from the broken, heaving thing under you back at the port. His eyes flash in the dark as he smooths his hair with his hand. 

You watch him kick off his shoes, nudge them under the bed, and unzip his track jacket before shrugging it off and into his suitcase. He looks so strange standing there in a cotton shirt, a black v-neck cut low enough to let you see the an inch or so of his chest hair, mussed and glinting with sweat, and your mouth _waters_ , your stomach plummets, your hands shake and shake and shake. 

You stand stupidly and silently, arms loose at your sides while your hands tremble in and out of desperate fists. You try and clear your head long enough to figure out what it is he wants, what’s acceptable to do, what it _means_ that only a half-hour ago, you broke all your vows to yourself and kissed Napoleon Solo breathless, felt him surge up against you in a tide of hard lines and sweat and heat and glory. You swallow, and the click of it sounds impossibly loud in the darkness. 

He reaches behind his neck to grab a fistful of black cotton, and tugs his teeshirt over his head in one easy motion. His hair sticks up in the back as the neck of the shirt rucks it up, and instinctively you stifle the urge to reach for it. His mouth is still so swollen and bruised and wet-looking from you that you cannot keep from staring, stomach churning. You think of saying his name, but you know it will come out sounding like a prayer, and you cannot pray to him in this moment, you cannot trust that it will not hurt to flay yourself open upon his blade. 

He looks at you and leans against the long mahogany desk opposite the bed, and you brace yourself for a joke, one of the countless sweet and meaningless lines you’ve seen him murmur into the ears of so many women, all curled around his shoulder with stars in their eyes. You brace yourself for composure, suaveness, nonchalance, charm. You even brace yourself for something lecherous or insulting, the five sharp, cold syllables of _homosexual_ , Napoleon Solo and his last laugh, careful and careless and ever sutured while you bleed and bleed. 

Instead, he looks at the floor and clears his throat before asking you, “Are you waiting for something?” in a voice that is not composed, suave, nonchalant, charming. It shakes like your hands, and before you allow fear to get its teeth in you, you’re across the room, you’re finding him in the dark.

Everything blurs, smudges. You want him to shake as you are shaking, you want the earth to rend apart between you, you want to follow him into the chasm. Suddenly, your fists are in his hair, and his breath huffs out in a small, perfect sound as you push up against him, trapping him between the desk and your body. “I...may I?” you manage to force out into the hot damp space between your lips. 

“God,” he murmurs, all black eyes and red mouth. He cups your face between two spread palms, and you think that perhaps no one has ever touched you like that before, no one has ever anchored you with such certainty, such solidity. “ _Please_.” 

You kiss him again. His mouth spreads wet and obscene under yours, tongue flicking against your teeth, the roof of your mouth, and he tastes like fire, he tastes like heaven. 

You clutch desperately for him, palming down the broad stretch of his shoulders and the taut, sweat-sticky muscle framing his spine, a broken sob wrenching up from your chest as you fall, drown, choke, disintegrate. Over and over again, you kiss him, such rough, breathless kisses because you fear that if you take time for breath, for tenderness, something might break. 

“God, Illya,” he murmurs into your kiss, voice all fissures and tatters. He trembles in your arms, and _this_ , this is what you want, what you have wanted ever since Istanbul, since _Rome_ , back when you would imagine hitting him, ripping his suit, mussing his hair, getting your hands on him and somehow smudging the perfect, crystalline glass of his exterior.

You wonder if you can exist around Napoleon Solo unless you have him like this, shaking as you are shaking, suffocating as you are suffocating. You want to see behind his veil; you need him broken, unmasked, giving you all his blood and all his scars, you and you alone. 

The horrible weight of such a bone-deep need stuns you. You _can’t_ have all these things; you couldn’t expect them from any lover and certainly not from Napoleon Solo, with his women, his endless parade of frivolity and flesh. Still, you cannot possibly stop, not now. Not with Napoleon hooking his elbow around your neck and drawing you closer, not with his teeth in your lower lip, his thigh between your legs. You will take whatever he gives you until there is nothing left, and you’ll long for more, but at least you have him here, at least you have him now. 

He makes an impatient sound, tugging uselessly at your turtleneck while you kiss down his jaw, loving the scrub of his stubble against your lips. You suck on the flutter of his pulse and feel his throat rumble under your tongue as he murmurs, “Can you take this off? Want your skin.” 

Your stomach drops. His words should not feel like thorns encircling your heart, but they _do_ , every single one a barb of heat and hunger driving into your insides. You tear away just long enough to struggle out of your shirt, and when you fall back against him, the drag of your bare skin together is enough for you to sob wordlessly into his shoulder. 

Everything feels so raw and real it _hurts_ , too much and not enough and all at once exactly what you want. Overcome and overwhelmed, you let him back you up against the bed so that it catches you behind the knees. In a clumsy blur of fingertips and limbs and all the while Napoleon’s slick, hot mouth open and panting against yours, you buckle under him and collapse onto the mattress under him. 

His crushing weight feels perfect, but you want him beneath you. You want to be able to _see_ him while you pick him apart, his eyes trembling behind the soft lids in rapture while you lick his bones clean, ivory shining in the moonlight. You roll him over, and he spreads out easily beside you, all pale skin dusted in coarse dark hair, the loveliest thing you have ever seen, let alone touched. 

He sighs as you rub your palm up his ribcage, from the cut of his oblique all the way to the flicker of his pulse, where you pause to feel how fast his heart is beating for you. 

“Napoleon,” you murmur without meaning to. It sounds raw and wrecked and naked in your thick and blood-black voice, and you wish for a fleeting moment that you had not said anything at all until he reaches for you and drags you down into him by your neck. 

“God,” he sighs, tongue flicking out to sweep across the corner of your mouth. “I’ve been waiting, wanting...fuck, _Illya_ ,” and it falls out of him, such a mess, skinned and weeping. It is not composed, suave, nonchalant, charming; it’s as thick and blood-black as you are, and you want to swallow it whole. 

You kiss him deep and feel his pulse speed up under the splay of your palm. Your hands shake and shake and shake. 

\---

You are content to do nothing but lie here and kiss Illya Kuryakin until your lips bleed, until you fall asleep breathless and chapped and scrubbed raw. You cannot remember the last time you were satisfied by so little, the last time you were not tempted to check your watch amidst less than heavy petting, anxious for it to escalate into something more. But this, you could do this forever. 

It’s not that you don’t want more from him, you _do_ , you want everything: you want him stripped in your bed and begging for you, you want the weight of him bearing down on your back, you want to feel him come inside you, you want to know how it tastes. But this, just this. Kissing him deep, his lips so plush and slick and swollen, his tongue slipping in alongside yours hot and molten, _feels_ like sex. You can’t get enough; you keep groaning aloud, and it doesn’t even sound like your voice, it doesn’t even sound _human_. 

He touches you with far more certainty than you expected from a man like Illya. Rough, heavy palms roving across you in broad sweeps, his thumbs digging into you like he wants to crack you open, an oyster from which he can suck brine. You’re not used to feeling _small_ in someone’s hands, so it keeps surprising you how easily he moves you around, spreads you out, pushes you apart, holds you close. And you think he is just going to touch you like this all night, drinking from your mouth and learning the topography of your body with his bruising palms, until everything changes. 

Quite suddenly, he wrenches away, lips wet and glistening in the dark as he regards you, holds you down with a single hand spread flat and heavy over your heart. 

He’s remarkably beautiful, pale skin highlighted in silver where he is backlit by the moon, blond hair worried into messy whorls from your searching fingers. He blinks at you, sitting back on his heels, too far away for you to crane your neck up off the mattress and kiss, so you must settle for simply looking at him, heart thundering.

“What?” you ask after a moment of loaded silence, wondering if his mind has finally caught up to him, Russia and its cruel smother of snow reminding him that this is a filthy, dangerous perversion he is throwing himself headlong into, this can only end in pain. You want to reach for him and prove otherwise, pull him back into the heat of your mouth and thaw those tendrils of frost, tell him _no, please, stay, stay, stay._

His hand rubs deliberately down the spasming ridges of your abdominals and pauses to rest above the waistband of your track pants. They are tented obscenely, your cock hard and leaking where it’s straining against the fabric. You splay your thighs wider, raising a eyebrow while you watch him watch you, fingers trembling against your skin with barely concealed restraint. He swallows and forces out, “I want…,” before cutting himself off, making a fist around the drawstring hem of your sweats. 

“Fuck, Illya,” you breathe, fire spiking in your stomach, “what do you want?” 

He shakes his head, staring down at you, the marvelous clench of his fist so close to your hard cock. “Everything,” he says quietly. Then, quieter, “я не знаю, с чего начать.” 

You swear as your cock twitches, drips, smearing the inside of your pants with sticky heat. “You can have whatever you want,” you tell him, reaching for his face, fingers bumping clumsily against the angle of his jaw in the dark. “Just tell me, I’ll give you--”

Your voice dries up in your throat as he grabs your wrist in a fierce, cutting grip and pins it above your head in one swift motion, so fast your breath catches, your vision whites out. It hurts; his thumb digs into the wild beat of your pulse as he bears down upon you, crushing pressure and labored breath and eyes that are nearly all black with pupil, his hips wide and sharp as he grinds down between your thighs, dry fucking you so hard against the mattress it whines under the rage of your combined weight. 

“You don’t understand,” he growls, mouth open and raw and full of teeth against your throat. “You don’t know. I want everything from you. Give everything to you,” he might be saying; you can’t tell because he’s rocking against you, so hard and so solid, and his voice is nothing but an anguished, animal growl muffled by your skin. 

“Oh my God,” you say breathlessly. There is nothing else to say; you don’t know what you don’t understand, you don’t know what he’s talking about or accusing you of, all you know is that you can hardly inhale under the rough drag of his body against yours, and you _don’t care_ , you want him to split you open, you want him to break you apart. You spread your legs to accommodate his breadth, groaning low and raw as you feel the length of his cock grinding against yours, so fucking hot it burns, even through the maddening layers of fabric. 

He thrusts hard and brutal and graceless, blistering friction and the dry scrub of bunched sheets at your back, where there will be burns tomorrow, if you live to see morning, if you ever breathe again. 

Illya’s teeth scrape across the cords in your neck up to your cheek, into your hair. Between fierce bites, there’s his wet soft mouth broken over unintelligible Russian, and between the sharp sting and the molten sweetness, you can barely hold on to your sanity; you’re coming apart under him, shuddering into fragments and wrecked, chopped gasps. 

The arm he does not have pinned above your head clutches around his shoulders, sliding across his skin, newly slick in a sheen of sweat. You dig your nails in to get a better grip on him lest you become unanchored and drift out into the chaos of his sea, but he doesn’t let you, grappling for your wrist and slamming it down alongside your other arm, so that you are crucified under his weight. 

You shut your eyes tight against an explosion of static and sensation as he buries his face in your underarm, inhaling, scouring his lips against matted down hair, tongue wet and hot and filthy. It’s too much, a deluge of sensation and astonishment because you never imagined he would let himself touch you like this, in all the times you imagined what it would be like if he were to let himself touch you at all. He bites the inside of your bicep and catches his breath, shuddering in overwhelm before he returns to licking up your sweat. You feel so _coveted_ , coveted and covered and contained, held together even as you are coming apart, flayed skin and cracked bone cradled in the cage of his palms. 

He makes a harsh, wounded sound against your heaving ribs, hips stuttering to a stop against yours, cock twitching palpably where it’s digging into your thigh. “Fuck,” you pray, struggling against his grip, wanting so badly to get your hands in his hair, on his skin, anything. Your palms tingle, increasingly numb as he cuts off your circulation, but he does not let you go, nearly sobbing as he rubs the thickness of his cock between your spread legs.

“Illya,” you choke out, wanting more than you can have in a single night, his come down your throat, clinging to the dark thatch of hair between your pectorals, surging deep inside you, filling you up. Anywhere that is not the inside of his sweat pants, anywhere you can _taste_ , feel. “Fuck, let me touch you, please,” you beg. “ _Please_.” 

He slows down but doesn’t let you go, like he hears you but can’t process what you’re saying. Still, his grip slackens enough in that moment you can rip out from the blinding pressure of his fists, fumble down his sticky back and into his pants with bloodless, clumsy hands.

You palm desperately over his ass, the taut, flickering planes of muscle in his powerful thigh. He presses his brow into your chest and looks down between your joined bodies, peeling away just enough so you can get your hand between your stomachs, fingers bumping down the cut ridge of his oblique.

Time stops as you tug his sweat pants and briefs down over his hips, tongue flitting out reflexively to lick your lips as you see his cock, thick and uncut and exactly how you remember from Cologne. “Fuck,” you murmur, mouth watering. 

You pull his cock out, steel-hard and impossibly hot in your palm. A string of precum dripping obscenely into the hair below your navel as you touch him, and it’s the most perfect thing. He wavers above you like a flame, braced on his hands and knees, the whole of him trembling. 

“Christ, Illya,” you breathe, weak with longing. His foreskin is gathered up around the head of his cock, so much precum pooled there you can’t even see the slit, just a shining slick of liquid, slippery and hot as you push your thumb through it, smearing it down the shaft. “God. You are so fucking beautiful,” you tell him. You know it’s too much, too honest a thing to say, but the words fall from your lips and into the night before you have time to think, to stop yourself. 

He makes a broken sound in the back his throat, hips rocking forward as he pushes his cock into your loose fist, fucking against your palm like it’s involuntary, like he can’t help it. “No,” is what he says then. The single syllable is hoarse, ripped, quiet. “You.” 

“Jesus,” you hiss as you push his foreskin down down his length to expose the head, using the generous handful of precum to lubricate your grip. He’s so hard and thick and twitching that you can tell he’s not going to last, and you want his come all over your body, you want to feel it fall in hot ribbons onto your skin, staining you, burning you. 

Using your free hand, you struggle to pull down your own pants. He sees what you’re doing and groans, helping you shove the waistband below your erection and over your thighs so your skin can touch, hot and wet and yearning. With an arm hooked around his neck, you pull him down over you so your cocks rub together, smearing precum and sweat, wrist aching as you clumsily jack him off. “Come against me,” you tell him, lips buried in the sweat damp curls of hair behind his ear. “I want you to come all over me Illya, want to feel you come,” you murmur mindlessly, hips stuttering up against his in graceless thrusts. “Please.” 

He sobs into your neck as he empties himself into your fist, spilling onto the tight, flickering planes of your stomach, searing and perfect. You grip him through the wild snaps and jerks of his body, eyes shut tight, breath caught, you are so moved by his pleasure, his abandon. “Fuck, Illya,” you murmur, cock still hard and pulsing under him as he collapses onto you, such a delicious and frustrating pressure, too much to struggle against, not enough to come. 

He rolls off you in a few moments, and you desperately inhale, vision still sparkling with static as you catch your breath. You don’t think much about what’s happening; you don’t wonder why the bed is whining under his shifting weight, why his weight is shifting at all, until you feel the rich, humid whisper of his breath against you. 

Your eyes fly open just in time to see him take the base of your cock in one of his huge, unreal hands and swallow the rest down, lips so plush and swollen as they split to accommodate you. 

It’s like a flash flood striking you down. Your spine arches up into a painful parabola as you fuck the sweetness of his mouth, head thrown back and skull grinding uselessly into the mattress, vision reduced to a haze of stars. Your hands flex, searching wildly for anything to fist into, the sheets, the ruin of his hair. You need to hold onto something because it is too good to bear, too good to stand, to survive. “Illya,” you say, over and over again, hoarse and pleading as you force your eyes open again to watch him while he fucks his mouth wide open on your length, grunting and drooling as he swallows, gagging as he tries to fit the whole of you inside. 

You love the way he looks like this, eyes flickering beneath soft lids, a deep crease through his forehead like it is bliss to have you inside him, nothing short of confession, of prayer. 

With that image burnt into your mind, his bent head and furrowed brow, you come, and it is so fast and hard, you feel like you’re getting swept away in a riptide, the feeling white-hot and filthy and pure. Too much to swallow, you feel some of it leaking back down into your pubic hair from the seal of Illya’s lips, diluted with his spit, mingling with his come, which clings to your stomach in still-warm ribbons. 

You reach down your body with a trembling palm and rub the mess into your skin, up to your heart.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am SO SORRY I've been neglecting this story! Here's an update for anyone whose still interested or who cares. I'm really invested in a another fandom right now, but I have almost 40k more of this story on my hard drive so I an keep posting until i figure out how it should end, lol. Thanks for being patient!

You lie between Napoleon’s spasming thighs for what feels like a long time, cheek pressed to his quadriceps, palms spread wide over his hip bones to ground him, keep him here under you, spread and broken and unbearably beautiful. You tilt your head occasionally to brush your ruined lips against the underside of his still-twitching cock, amazed by the way he feels, how real and perfect and absolving this _all_ feels. You have never done this with a man before, so you wait in partial anticipation of a wave of horror or shame or regret to consume you, but it never comes. You feel nothing but awed and grateful, here before Napoleon with the corners of your mouth torn and jaw aching. 

 

You listen to his breath slow down and even out, and there is a part of you that mourns this shift. You want him wrecked for you always, so broken and beside himself that he never recovers from you, forever ruined for other lovers. It’s selfish and you know it, but it is true, and you feel compelled to indulge yourself in your basest of desires right now, while he is still spread beneath you, wrecked and heaving and painted in your come. 

 

Eventually, he bends a knee, calf brushing up alongside your ribcage as he sighs. “Wow,” he says then, voice quiet, reedy. 

 

He reaches out and grazes your skull with his fingers, and you think about the word _wow_ , tilting into his touch. It’s terrifically American; it reminds you of comic books and superheroes and other frivolities, the kind of word you say through a mouthful of surprisingly decent diner food or following a particularly entertaining film at the nickelodeon. It’s a simple word, an expression of awe but not a _serious_ one; it does not match the gravity you feel in your own chest, the bone-deep, endless aching for him you fear will grip you always, a relentless fist at your throat. 

 

You swallow and peel away from his skin, wondering how to guard yourself against Napoleon Solo’s _carelessness_ , his insincerity and pop art sensibilities when you have just come apart in his arms. You are about to stand and gather your things, when he speaks. 

 

“I have to clean up,” he says, face unreadable in the dark. “If I go into the bathroom for a moment, will you try not to disappear while I’m gone?” 

 

You stare at him as he rolls to the edge of the bed and rises on unsteady legs, wondering why _he_ is the one telling you not to disappear. Then you realize that he’s referring to Cologne, the first time your desires collided and did not synch up perfectly, the first time you wanted more from Napoleon Solo than any man could offer. Something hard and cold settles over your body, heavy in your gut like a sinking stone. You are very suddenly chilled, sweat cooling on your skin so you tug your sweat pants up, just now noticing they have been tangled around your knees. 

 

He watches you, standing naked beside the bed with his hands braced on his hips, come drying white and crusted in the hair dusting the bitten skin below his navel. He is so beautiful, you ache; you want to push a thumb into the cold blue of his eye and taste the color of the sky; you want to draw him into your arms and hide your face in his hair and confess what is truly happening, the mess you’ve made by loving him, the wild reckless love of a man who made the mistake of thinking he had no seed to cultivate, no essential self to give to another. 

 

“I see,” he says, folding his arms. You only then realize you haven’t answered him. 

 

“No,” you say, shaking your head, eyes dropping to the rumpled sheets in confusion, humiliation. “I will stay.” 

 

“Don’t stay if you’d rather not,” he says quickly. It has the potential to bite, but it doesn’t; there’s something muting his words, like he is trying to sound unaffected but failing, falling short of nonchalance and landing somewhere in the realm of exhaustion, instead. 

 

Of course you would rather stay. Not just tonight but forever, and that is surely not what he means, what he is prepared to endure in inviting you into the cursed, magnetic space around him. You should check yourself, you should protect yourself, but you don’t. The shape of his mouth is too irresistible in the moonlight, and you want to smooth that crease through his brow with your thumb. 

 

“Napoleon,” you say, his name sounding strange and forbidden, too intimate now that you’re not tangled together, his skin no longer under your tongue. Regardless, it stops him in his tracks, makes his eyes flutter closed and his lips flatten out into a bloodless line. “I want to stay.” 

 

“You do?” He asks, sounding skeptical.

 

“Yes,” you say. “Go.”

 

He nods curtly and leaves. 

 

You hear the water running from the bathroom and imagine him wiping his stomach clean with a wet wash cloth, smoothing dark hair down against his skin, and merely envisioning it makes your cock twitch, your stomach drop. You keep remembering the silken heat of his cockhead against your lips, the too-salty too-bitter spill of his seed burning down your throat, better than you would have imagined if you would have allowed yourself to imagine such a thing. 

 

Heart refusing to slow, you turn down the already ruined sheets of his bed and slide between them, even though you’re unsure if it’s inappropriate, invasive, presumptuous. They’re warm from the heat of his body, and you occupy the space, pressing your nose into the pillow and inhaling to see if you can catch traces of his scent, even though this is a hotel, and you’re certain the maid service changed his pillowcases when they came this morning, just as they changed your own. Still, you try. Then you remember that last night he brought a woman back to this very room. She probably tossed her perfumed head across this very pillow, worrying it to tangles as he made her feel impossibly good, just as he made you feel impossibly good. 

 

The surge of jealousy is sickening, ugly and illogical and dangerous but far too immense to consider ignoring. You curl yourself around it, suddenly grateful for the laundered pillowcases. 

 

The water shuts off, and Napoleon returns, hair combed down into a version of its former self, wet and neat, and your heart aches because that is one less mark you have made on him. 

 

He looks at you and very nearly smiles, the corner of his mouth twitching before it smooths out. “I thought you might have changed your mind, but here you are. Making yourself comfortable.” 

 

You want to ask if that’s alright, but he leans down and kisses you before you have time to speak, palm spread on the side of your face, lips soft and faintly metallic from all the times you bit them. You melt into the perfect sinful heat of his mouth, overcome. He clambers alongside you into the bed, and you hold on to him, the span of his shoulders warm and solid and real and unrelenting.

 

“Peril,” he whispers, tongue flicking out to trace the peak of your upper lip, “the way you kiss--” 

 

You feel your cheeks flush as you cut him off, sucking his lips into your mouth and between your teeth, lapping at the roof of his mouth, dragging your tongue rough and flat against his. After a moment, you manage to ask, “Good?” and he laughs, shaking his head. 

 

“Yeah,” he says, lips brushing against yours as you share breath. “Good. Though that might be an understatement.” Then, after a moment of carding his hands through your hair and regarding you, he frowns. “In Cologne,” he asks, thumb ghosting over the scar on your brow, “why didn’t you let me kiss you?” 

 

You shake your head. You have asked yourself this same question countless times, analyzed your fear and your panic and your shame in all its many facets, its many thorns. The truth is, of course, that you couldn’t let him kiss you because it felt like a betrayal to yourself and to him, when you loved him and he knew nothing of it. It still does, now, if you think hard about it, although you are not so sure of anything anymore. 

 

You lick your lips and decide on the simplest, most guarded version of the truth. “Everything is a joke to you.” You remember that solitary word after you made him come, _wow_ , like a speech bubble in a pop art painting, Warhol, Lichtenstein. He stirs against you, a line through his brow, and you add, “This is not a joke, for me.” 

 

Miraculously, he nods, like he understands, even though you know he does not, cannot. He catches your mouth in his, and you don’t know how to resist him anymore so you don’t, moaning low in your throat as he kisses you and kisses you, slow and tender brushes of his lips, tongue sweeping over your teeth. You hold on to him too tightly because you do not yet know how to do this without worrying he will somehow disappear. 

 

You part to breathe, gasping into the tight, close space between you, and Napoleon takes your face between his palms and draws you close. “Illya,” he breathes with a pleading kind of desperation, eyes wide. “I am not joking.” 

 

Your heart pounds so hard you know he must hear it, he must feel it resounding against his own sternum as he pitches back down and kisses you and kisses you, thumb hooking into your cheek, sliding into your mouth rough and salty. And perhaps you shouldn’t because you know him, know his thief’s tricks and his chess gambits and the cursed, magnetic space around him, but as he tells you again with his fingers in your mouth, _I am_ not _joking_ , you believe him. 

 

He kisses you and kisses you, pickpocket’s hands all over your body as he lies or maybe does not lie. “That night,” he tells you as he kisses a trail down your chest, wet and hungry, open mouthed, “in Cologne. I made myself come in the bathroom thinking about kissing you, just kissing you.” Then he laughs humorlessly, rubbing his stubble-rough jaw against your skin, stinging and perfect. “I don’t know why I’m telling you that. You must think I’m ridiculous, at best. You must think I’m sick.”

 

“No,” you tell him, heart beating so hard, just below the slick, hot spread of his mouth. You worry his hair up into cowlicks, nails razing against the curve of his scalp. “I don’t. Not for that.”

 

He smiles, teeth flashing in the darkness. “For what, then?” His hands slide down either side of your ribcage to still at your hips, and he asks, “What about me makes you sick?” 

 

_That you are not mine_ , you want to say. _That you fucked some Danish woman here in this same bed only last night, that you would find and fuck another woman tonight if I were not here. That you do not and cannot want me as I want you, a want to end all other want, a want to end the world, the deepest and most terrible want. That you are not mine, as I am and ever will be yours_. Even as you think these things, you know that they’re unfair. These are not the things that make you sick about Napoleon Solo, these are the things that make you sick about yourself, the things you hate yourself for feeling, selfish impossibilities and aimless yearning. You have lived your whole life believing that want is both weak and dishonorable, and here you are, drowning in it. 

 

You make a fist in his hair and tilt him back so that you can regard him. “Your taste in art,” is all you can come up with. “I hate Lichtenstein.” _I hate the word “wow”_ you think, _I hate dada and pop art. I hate understatement and jokes I do not understand and images repeated so many times they lose all their meaning. I hate that you are not mine. This is not a joke, for me._

 

He is laughing, propping himself up on his elbows and shifting up your body so he can rub his cheek against yours, nosing against the shell of your ear. This laugh sounds so strange and pure. A far cry from his usual laughter, fake and measured, manufactured to suit whoever he is speaking to, lying to. The other is thief’s laughter, meant to steal trust, but this, this isn’t. It’s a real laugh, just for you, and you want to die inside its brash, musical gracelessness. “Peril,” he says gently, fingers twisting in your hair. “You really are the most charming man I have ever met.” 

 

It could be a joke, but it doesn’t sound like one. This laugh could be manufactured, too, but it doesn’t sound like it. He kisses you as he lies, or does not lie, and you cannot tell or care anymore because it feels too good to fight it any longer, you are _tired_ of fighting Napoleon Solo and his curse, his magnetism. 

 

You kiss and kiss and kiss for what feels like hours. You kiss slow and languid until it escalates back into rough hunger, before it eventually melts back into tenderness again. You kiss until your lips sting, until you nearly fall asleep with his breath against your mouth before starting awake, stunned to realize that you had not dreamt this whole thing up. 

 

And eventually you do fall asleep, pressed up alongside him just as dawn arrives, bringing with it seabirds crying in a chorus outside the window, like chimes of sea glass. Curved around his back like scar tissue around an entry site, you do not dream. 

 

\---

 

Morning comes too soon after sunrise. You wake to find Illya jammed under the careless toss of your arm, sticky with sweat and alive and miraculous. You can feel him radiating waves of heat beside you, you can measure the careful in and out of his breath, and you want to lie here so still while he sleeps, memorize everything about this moment in case it is the last time you ever have him like this. With your lips against his spine, you open hazy eyes to trace the shape of him in half-darkness and wonder if any of it is real. 

 

The whole night before is a blur. Messy and spit-slick fragments of Illya’s rough, marvelous hands all over your body, his weight crushing the air from your lungs, his sloppy, inexperienced mouth so perfect and sweet and scalding on your cock, your throat, everywhere else. Just skin and teeth and breath and breath and breath, so much of him that it seems impossible, especially when you told yourself that this could never happen, that if Illya ever let you get this close, it would be to kill you, nothing less. 

 

He twitches in your arms, reflexive and involuntary, as you tense up behind him, as if he can sense even in sleep that you’re thinking about death. You spread your fingers on his chest, wanting to keep him where he is, but he stretches, flinches, rolls over. In the grey of morning, he blinks at you, a crease through his brow. 

 

Your stomach drops to see his mouth still so swollen and red from your teeth. His lips look chapped at the corners, and you lose your mind a little, pitching forward into the warm huff of his sleep-sour breath and kissing him, soothing the chapped skin with your tongue, not pausing to care or worry whether the daylight has changed anything between you. 

 

Still, as he opens up for you instantly, you are so very relieved. You kiss him deep, his mouth soft and bitten under yours, salty where you can still taste yourself on his teeth, and the thrill of such a revelation makes your breath catch, your nails dig into his skin. 

 

“Good morning,” you rasp when he pulls away. 

 

He looks at you, lashes clumped together as he blinks and frowns like he’s uncertain whether you’re real. His face is so stunned that it looks like a boy’s, so clear and young and lovely that you want to rub your thumb over the flush of his cheek to feel the raw human heat of it. 

 

“Good morning to you,” he mumbles back, tilting into your palm. Then he cuts his eyes away from yours, gaze falling to your shoulder, your neck, both of which are littered with stinging marks from his teeth, dappled red and purple in obscene rings. “I have never done this before,” he adds after a moment, voice uncertain like a confession. 

 

Your heart clenches. You’re forced to wonder what exactly it is that he’s never done before, which of the many transgressions you’ve committed together that he feels the need to address. Kissed a man? Sucked one to finish? Begun something less than professional with a fellow agent? Stayed up all night kissing like a teenager? Left marks on someone’s skin? Felt good, at all, ever? 

 

“What, exactly, have you never done?” you decide to ask him, and you feel his cheek heat up under your thumb, the blood rushing to the surface in a tide of humiliation. 

 

“Woken up with someone,” he says after a long moment of prudent consideration, as if he, too, is filing through a list of firsts and plucking from it the least shameful, the least dangerous. The easiest mistake to talk about from a well of seething sin. 

 

Your stomach tightens as he says it. You want to pull him into you, you want to give him the key to your needlessly comfortable apartment, the one you can hardly even remember the layout of in favor of a blended mess of hotel room interiors. Regardless, you want to offer it to him so that he never has to wake up alone again, forever tucked under the weight of your arm as you draw his killer’s body up tight against yours, pretending that you are the thing he wants, the thing that could save him from his past, his future, blood sticky and clotted beneath his nails. So many impossible, foolish things with Illya Kuryakin. 

 

“I see,” you say. “In spite of my many predilections, I also try not to make a habit of this particular one.” You do not add, _since it makes those cold mornings alone so much more difficult to bear, having a warmth to measure it against_ It is not something you would believe in your own voice, no matter how true it feels now, in this moment when you are dreaming of keys, apartments, futures. So many impossible, foolish things with Illya Kuryakin. 

 

He studies you, mouth heavy and eyes unreadable beneath a guarded crease in his brow. Your hand falls away from his face, as if he has accused you of something. Eventually he says, “Do you regret this?” 

 

“Christ,” you mumble, dragging yourself across the few inches remaining between your bodies to bury your face in his throat. He stops breathing. “ _No_ ,” you answer, voice unrecognizably rough against his skin. You remember your pleading from last night, Illya’s expression all at once stoic and wounded as you told him, _I am not joking_. Your voice always wavers around the truths it is unused to telling. 

 

He cups one of those huge hands at the base of your skull and holds you close as you struggle to breathe against the smother of his skin. You feel him inhaling your hair, so wet and ripped it is almost a sob, fingers tangled in the sex-mussed curls behind your ear. He mumbles something in Russian before he lets you go, but you cannot make it out and are afraid to ask. 

 

“As much as I would prefer to spend the whole day as we spent the whole night, I fear we have a plane to catch this evening,” you murmur, disentangling from his limbs, cock half-hard for him against your thigh. “I also suspect Gaby is going to come knocking on either of our doors any minute now to tell us where that plane is going.” 

 

He sits up abruptly, jaw set tight and a sort of panic brightening his eyes. “What do we do? I am not in my room, my clothes--”

 

“Relax, Peril,” you say, sliding out of bed on weak legs, wincing at how exhausted you feel. There’s an ache in your solar plexus, too much feeling and not enough sleep, and beneath that, the ever-present awareness that Illya is unbroken. He’s a flight risk, he’s never woken up with someone before, and he’s certainly never fucked a man before, never lived in the shadows like that, in stolen moments behind locked doors. You shrug on your robe, peer at yourself in the vanity mirror to straighten your hair. “You came over early this morning to discuss the mission. We had coffee together.” 

 

“Yes,” he says, hobbling out of your bed and back into his running clothes, looking absurd with his hair rucked up in the back, his cheeks such a guilty shade of red. You have to look away from him; his confusion is so brazen, so irresistible. “Why am I wearing this?” 

 

“You ran to Puerto Cortez, of course,” you say, spooning grounds into the espresso machine. “In the chill of dawn. There were seabirds and the quaintest little fishing boats bobbing out in the harbor.” 

 

He approaches you cautiously in unlaced boots, reaching out for the hollow of your throat. Your heart stops as his thumb brushes against your skin, his lashes lowered and eyes so blue you want to go swimming, you want to drown amid the seabirds, the fishing boats, dawn overhead and Illya’s fists around your throat. “What about these?” he murmurs, tracing one of the bruises he left on you. 

 

“She won’t assume they’re from you,” you explain, waving a hand through the air dismissively. 

 

Illya wavers, darkens. His hand convulses into a balled fist on your chest, and you can feel the air changing around him, a darkness corroding his tenderness, his uncertainty. It is all at once terrifying and thrilling, and you immediately reach for his forearm, gripping it tight to protect yourself from that fist, which you do not entirely trust to not come slicing into the wall beside your head. “I want her to,” Illya grinds out from behind his teeth, staring at your neck and its collar of bites. 

 

You shudder; your cock thickens and twitches beneath your robe. “You what?” you ask him, thumbing deep into the taut, flickering tendons of his arm. 

 

“I don’t know,” he huffs, palming over your chest, brow dropping to yours and pressing into it so hard your vision blurs. “I don’t want her to know, but I don’t want her to think anyone else has touched you. I don’t want anyone else to touch you.” As soon as he says it, he wrenches away from you, head in his hands as he stumbles for the door, and no, no you will not let him run now, when there is no desert and no sunset, and you have already felt the glorious power of him between your thighs. You will not lose him now that he’s admitted he’s jealous; he’s possessive and full of rage and the worst kind of person to tangle with, but you are already so tangled that there is no hope of extricating yourself now. You want his rope around your neck, you want to hang by it. 

 

“Illya,” you snap, exasperated. You catch up to him before he can unlatch the chain lock, grabbing him by his shoulders and spinning him around, slamming the bulk of him so hard against the door that it thuds in its frame. “Don’t you run from me, not now, not when you let something like that drop, my God,” you tell him fiercely, teeth bared, voice snagging. “You are so impossible.” 

 

He tilts his head up and away from you, eyes wet and breath wrecked as he heaves against the wall. “This is impossible. It will never work.” 

 

“I don’t care,” you say, surprising yourself. You press yourself flush against him, watch with your mouth hanging open as he writhes against you with his eyes screwed shut. “I fight every goddamned day to protect the secrets of a county I have no loyalty to, I’m not going to throw away one of the few pleasures I’ve come across amid that miserable, pointless existence because it might end in flame. You’re going to end in flame anyway, Illya. Aren’t you?” 

 

He opens his eyes then, and they are black with fury; you think he’s going to hit you, but instead he softens, something human and organic flickering in his jaw as his hands rise to alight unsteadily on your shoulders, alternating between fists and flat, sweating palms. Tentatively, you press your lips to his temple, and he gasps. He is the most beautiful thing; more beautiful than anything else you have ever been moved to possess. Your fingers creep into his hair, and you feel his mouth open against your throat. “It’s too much. Everything I want. You will see,” he mumbles. 

 

“God,” you sigh, breathing him in. “I can’t think of anything better than uncovering whatever it is that you, Peril, deem ‘too much.’ I’m an art thief, remember?”

 

He pushes you off after a moment, standing and rubbing his face with two spread palms, inhaling raggedly. “I remember,” he says. 

 

The espresso machine is whistling and choking from the vanity, and you steer him to it, one hand braced on the small of his back, on his black shirt still damp from last night’s sweat and the sea air. “Coffee, remember. Finish it while I get a shirt on. One that buttons up to my chin, since I have so much to hide.” 

 

He doesn’t look at you, so you are forced to only imagine the glorious tapestry of feeling woven into his features. All his rage, all his humiliation, all his jealousy. Too much, apparently, though as you rifle through your suitcase with still-trembling hands and a stomach tight with hunger, it feels like not enough. 

 

\---  
If Gaby notices anything out of the ordinary, she does not comment on it. She briskly hands you economy tickets on a flight back to New York, grumbling about how Waverly told her first class was booked, but that she suspects he was just being stingy. Your eyes keep flickering to Napoleon as Gaby talks, wondering if he has been somehow _changed_ , as you feel changed. You feel altered indelibly by his touch, so drastically and obviously that it seems like there must be something _visible_ , something Gaby could see, touch. 

 

You move your arms restlessly, crossing them and uncrossing them as you will yourself to stop looking at Napoleon, your gaze cutting down to the carpet and away from the elegant slant of his wrist as he sips his espresso. Your heart has not slowed, not since he put you up against the wall and you let him, ugly things falling from your lips like a leak in a dam, concrete weakening toward an inevitable collapse and deluge. You keep thinking of his eyes, wide and clear beneath the eternal furrow of his brow, his mouth a soft red shape as he begged you to stay. Even after you cracked, even after he felt the force of the flood, all of that rage to drown in. 

 

None of this seems possible. You are exhausted and aching, and your nerves are drawn tight with the exertion of lying to Gaby. Before U.N.C.L.E., you had always been used as a blunt instrument, never required to perfect the finer points of espionage, deceit, and the charm that comes along with selling that deceit. You can feel this weakness stand out in stark relief as you take your place beside Napoleon, who is lying to Gaby so easily and artfully you half-believe him, even though you know full well what he was _really_ doing last night. He makes it all look so effortless, so natural, lies alongside his designer suits like a pair of his polished cufflinks.

 

It worries you, to be reminded of how convincing a liar Napoleon is. To witness firsthand how little it seems to bother him, lying to those he supposedly cares about. You think of all the things he has said to you, all the stomach-turning, heart-breaking confessions he whispered against your lips over the last 24 hours. Designer suits, polished cufflinks. Such pretty lies, too nuanced for a blunt instrument to parse whatever truth they may or may not be concealing. 

 

Doubt twists in your gut, blackening you from the inside out. 

 

Then, as you all part ways to pack in your respective hotel rooms, he catches your eye as you’re leaving, and the corner of his mouth quirks up into the ghost of a smile, just for a moment. 

 

It is so reflexive, so organic; you feel your body react to seeing just that fleeting glimpse of his interior, a spreading heat between your lungs as your heart starts into your throat. “Peril,” he says, tilting his chin up. You note the rustle of his collar against his Adam’s apple as it bobs, and you want so desperately to rip that topmost button asunder. You imagine kissing the proof you have touched him, bruises hidden beneath crisp cotton, and your jaw clenches in futile longing. 

 

“What,” you say, narrowing your eyes. You are uncertain if he possesses the decency to not hit you with some parting innuendo, something flippant and lewd like _wow_ as you leave his room, his sweat under your nails, his spit on your teeth. A night of life-altering firsts reduced to _be sure to stretch when you get back to your room, those morning runs can’t be all good for anyone. I’d hate for you to lose any of your natural flexibility._ You tighten your grip on the edge of the door, braced, waiting. 

 

He only reaches out and brushes the backs of his hand ever so fleetingly over that fierce, crushing grip of yours, his knuckles unbearably loose and soft while yours are white, bloodless. He looks at you, head cocked as he adjusts his sleeve, as if the touch had never happened. “Take care,” he says. 

 

You walk to your room with your fingers extended and flexing, still burning from his touch, and you think of lies, of truths, and of Napoleon’s throat chafed pink under a crisp, starched collar.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look at what a good job I'm doing updating this!!! Here you go. Soooooo much pining.

You do not want to shower Illya off you. It seems like such a waste, since you can still bring your fingers under your nose and smell musk, the sharp bite of his underarm sweat, the salt of his come. All of his humanity, ripe and undistilled and perfect. 

 

You sit before the vanity, sipping your second espresso (the one Gaby refused) and smelling your fingers, wondering what absurd, foolish thing you’re throwing yourself into like a _boy_ , seventeen and gun-wielding and bright-eyed and stupid and hopeful. A boy who went by Leon, who was thrilled by the prospect of defending his country from the Nazis, who gave his first handjob in a tent staked out on the European countryside to another boy who died two months later, staring down the barrel of his own jammed rifle. You had all been fools, young and stupid and naive, and you’ve changed so very much since then, grown plated armor and coated yourself in oil and blood-sheen so that anyone who tried to hold on simply slid away. 

 

You inhale from your fingers, eyes closed, brow heavy. You don’t know what you’re doing with Illya Kuryakin, who has managed to keep you willingly suffocating in the savagery of his grip. You only know that there’s nothing you can do to _stop_ now: you’ve picked your death, dug your grave. You’ve taken the bit in your teeth, and if he runs, he’s taking you with him. 

 

You down the rest of your espresso, sighing. Your stomach is in knots around this wild thorn of love inside you, a pain like poison, like invasion. You can smell him on your skin, and it feels perfectly _wrong_ that he’s not in your room anymore.

 

How could you, a man who left his boy’s foolishness amid the bodies in Europe, have ended up here, dreaming impossible dreams? You rub your face with two open palms, considering that even if there was a way to pull out of this, you don’t _want_ to. You want him back in your room, pale skin spread out against paler sheets, his scar tissue rippled and shining under your fingers. You want to spend hours on your knees for him, showing him how _good_ it can be, even in stolen moments behind locked doors. 

 

Fingers on your buttoned collar, you fidget under the scratch of cotton, thinking of the way he sucked those marks into your skin, one after the other, like he wanted you to be covered in him, owned by him. The grand, savage horror of _I don’t want anyone else to touch you_ repeats in your mind, Illya’s voice run through with cracks. 

 

When other lovers want to possess you, it usually makes you grow weary of them, bored by a chase that is no longer a chase. You wonder why it’s different with him, why the thought of him killing his competition makes your stomach contract, blood rushing inevitably between your thighs. You wonder why _love_ , of all things, is supposed to be kind and forgiving and selfless, when it is clearly the cruelest thing of all. More cruel than your barbed mask of long-fashioned cruelty, more cruel than a life built on lies and steeped in violence. 

 

You shudder, overwhelmed. It has been so very long since you coveted anything beyond a single night of simple pleasure, and the magnitude of your craving has you sick, startled. You should not be thinking of your apartment in New York, and you should not be thinking about what it might feel like to be covered in, or owned by, Illya Kuryakin. 

 

Still, as you head woefully to the bathroom to flick on the hot water, you _do_ think about it. Half smiling to yourself, fingers rubbing thoughtfully at the skin above your upper lip as you steal one last, filthy breath of him. 

 

\---

 

The flight back to U.N.C.L.E. headquarters is worlds different from the last two flights you spent beside Napoleon Solo, barely stomaching the altitude, the ache. This time, Napoleon orbits around you the way that you feel you have been so obviously and mortifyingly orbiting around him; he is a mess of lingering eye contact and hardly suppressed smirks, he keeps positioning himself in your wake so that you must maneuver around him lest you converge in public. Your stomach is in knots the whole time you are at the airport, and you’re grateful for how much of your face your sunglasses cover, otherwise Gaby would surely comment on what feels like a permanent flush.

 

Napoleon skims his fingers along the back of your hand when he reaches up to help you wrestle your duffle into the overhead compartment, brushing his hips against your ass as he squeezes past you in the aisle. It all would have been too much several days ago, an agonizing series of idle touches forcing you to question his intentions, whether he simply wanted to wind you up and get under your skin, or if there was any true intention behind the contact. Whether he even noticed the effect he had on you at all. 

 

Now, you know what he’s doing. He is, perhaps, toying with you, but he’s also keeping you from drowning in a sea of your own self-doubt. Each touch, no matter how fleeting or chaste, is stained in context from the night prior, loaded with meaning, laced in the promise of something _more_ than a hollow, drunken night sprawled out under him in Cologne. You always assumed that if you ever caved in to his wishes, it would only be for one night, the single night he wanted you, thrilled by the grand impossibility of bedding a KGB agent, a temporary installation in his collection of stolen art. But now you know he is at least curious about what you have to offer, curious enough to dip into the terrible flood of your hunger for him. _I can’t think of anything better than uncovering whatever it is that you deem “too much,_ ” you remember him saying, the blue of his eyes almost warm, clear sky sidled up against sun. 

 

It is not as comforting as it should be. You are not convinced that this can survive in New York, with U.N.C.L.E. headquarters so near, on Napoleon’s home soil and, inevitably, near an endless list of old flames and flames to be. He may be curious, but curiosity flounders and drowns in the sea of love, it must. You doubt little could survive your sea, for your rage makes everything into a tempest. Years in the KGB have molded you for efficiency, and anything that did not fit neatly into your carefully hewn existence as a tool, an instrument for your country, you systematically silenced or ignored. Drips became puddles, which became seas, which became tempests, and now here you are, all billowing gales and lightning storms, and Napoleon is _curious_. 

 

He doesn’t know how you are, he _can’t_ know. He’s an American; he has built his life around indulging petty wishes just as you have built your life around denying yourself indulgence and pettiness and wishes at all. You are poised to destroy each other’s lives and careers. However, you suspect Napoleon cares less about such an end than you do, as Americans are as self-destructive as they are self-congratulatory, and he takes every opportunity to remind you of his disinterest in patriotism. It is up to you, then, to keep this from imploding. 

 

He leans into your space under the guise of tucking Gaby’s tag back into the scooped neck of her dress, sleeve brushing your chest in the process. So close, close enough you can smell his aftershave, the irresistible sweetness of his breath, and just those scents alone light you on fire. You grind your teeth, thinking that you cannot be trusted to stop this. You cannot be trusted with anything. All you can do is remind yourself to not get too caught up in the glory of it, so that you may survive when it all burns out. 

 

This is temporary, whatever it is. It must be; you cannot believe anything else, for it will only make your fall from grace that much more painful. So it will carry on, past Cologne, past Puerto Cortez, overseas and into New York, if he lets you. And if the way his gaze keeps climbing the span of your back, boring holes into your flesh like he wants to crawl inside you, he will let you. If the way he said _don’t you run from me, not now_ means anything, he will let you, he will let you. 

 

Your stomach flips over under the heat of his gaze, and you shift in the too-small economy seat between him and the window. You watch him cross his legs, adjusting his position until his thigh presses deliberately into yours, two planes of yearning muscle, flush and aching. You finally look at him, blinking helplessly because you’re on an international flight and not in a hotel room with him, you can’t get your hands on his skin, but it is all you’re thinking about, all you want, all you’re made of. 

 

You expect him to be smirking, so you’re bowled over when he is not. He looks back at you, eyes bright and wide and lost as he pulls his bottom lip under his teeth in a way that is too sudden to be premeditated, too reflexive to be manipulative. Napoleon Solo, his bones showing, his heart beating, and you almost forget that you cannot reach out and slide a finger over that brilliant flash of ivory. 

 

You shake your head, he clears his throat, and then both of you look away. 

 

\---

 

You’re a wreck of sleep-deprivation, jet-lag, and pathetic, schoolboy longing when you finally make it to New York. It’s pouring when you get there, grey skies and streets slick like black, trash-choked veins branching out radially from the heart of Manhattan. It’s in stark contrast to the sun-soaked salt air of Honduras, and even though you are not a superstitious person, you still try not to take it as an omen. 

 

Gaby flags down a taxi, and then you’re off to U.N.C.L.E. headquarters, windshield wipers slicing through a layer of rain, the city distorted through the hazy wet of it all. You steal occasional glances at Illya, his hands sun-browned and a scatter of freckles across his nose, both of which look so terribly, beautifully absurd amid so much grey and rain. 

 

After crawling nearly an hour in traffic, the taxi drops you off at a nondescript tailor shop in Brooklyn, Waverley’s artless cover for headquarters. You do not have an umbrella, so you cover your head with your jacket; Gaby is short enough to share the space with you, but Peril, of course, is not. You watch the rain slide down his neck in rivulets and sluice through his hair, thinking that you are entirely too exhausted to endure such a thing. 

 

The next several hours are a blur of Gaby debriefing your last mission and Waverly going on and on about new protocol you will never be able to remember. He gives you a tour of the expansion and construction that’s happened since you were overseas, and you can’t focus on any of it, your eyes fixed pointedly to the ground, to the reflective yellow badge he pinned you with upon arrival, or to the twitching corner of Illya’s mouth, where you imagine placing one hundred kisses. You must be sighing audibly because at one point Waverly snaps his fingers in front of you and asks, “Mr. Solo, have you heard a single thing I’ve said?”

 

“I am trying,” you say after a deep inhalation, “very hard to. Unfortunately, that was a terribly long flight and a terribly slow taxi ride, and I have an apartment several blocks away with a well-stocked wine cellar, and no offense to you, Alexander, but that wine cellar, among other things, is taking precedent over these cutting-edge forensics labs that I will likely never set foot in. Forgive me.” 

 

Waverly cocks his head, and you notice his lips purse when you call him Alexander. If this were the CIA, you might get reprimanded for such a thing, but it’s not. “I suggest you try harder,” he says, half-smiling. “You never know when we might decide to train you in forensics.” 

 

You look at Illya, to see if he’s half as bored and worn down and ruined as you feel, and immediately regret it because his hair is still wet, his lips are still swollen, and you want nothing more than to take him home and pour him wine and sink your hands wrist-deep in those damp blond curls. You suck in a sharp breath and nod crisply to Waverly. “I will try my very best.” 

 

Waverly’s tour ends in a cold hallway flanked by what appear to be stark, sparsely furnished bedrooms. “Mr. Kuryakin, Ms. Teller,” he says with his head cocked, “to save you, and myself, quite frankly, the trouble of finding you a hotel room in Manhattan on a Saturday night, you’re welcome to temporarily use the provided lodging.” 

 

You raise your eyebrows, Gaby wrinkles her nose. Illya does nothing, but you hope he’s as dissatisfied as you are. “What are these even for? Witness protection? Because I’ve seen foreign prison cells more luxurious than these,” you say, eying the hospital-white walls, the yellow trim. “They’re for whenever we might need them,” Waverly says with a shrug. You’re not entirely sure who decided that U.N.C.L.E.’s unofficial color was school-bus yellow, but you suspect it might be the same man who’s standing before you, brows knit together in mock innocence like he thinks these rooms are anything other than insulting. 

 

Illya is already dumping his duffel bag onto one of the flat white beds, and you would be lying if the sight of him so readily committing to sleeping here when you have an apartment with a wine cupboard several blocks away, the idea of your cold, months-untouched sheets doesn’t make your skin crawl in aimless yearning. You suppose he is a Soviet, however, and is perhaps comforted by hospital-white with yellow trim. Your wine cupboard, your Picasso and your Rembrandt, and your fine ebony dresser and the bed with the convenient wrought-iron frame might prove unsettling for Illya Kuryakin. 

 

If you were not so sleep-deprived and jet-lagged, you might be dealing with this possibility better. But you are; you’re exhausted, your bones ache, and you hate yourself for wanting to spend as much time as humanly possible with a Soviet man, someone who likely does not want the same foolish, excessive thing you want of him. 

 

You badly, badly need sleep. 

 

So you stare at the floor and let him go. 

 

\---

 

One and a half days pass, and you do not hear from Napoleon Solo. You spend your time absently touching the absurd toy of a communicator that Waverly gave you: a slender and silver wireless thing disguised as a fountain pen. You will surely snap it in half at some point; it’s too fragile for a man your size, and you have a tendency to jam things in your pockets for convenience's sake, but for the time being, you are very careful with it, in case Napoleon uses it in favor of a telephone. 

 

In his absence, you feel like you’re going crazy. You imagine one hundred plausible scenarios, all the New York women who missed him when he was away, women he takes home after he takes them dancing, all the other possibilities he has to entertain that are not you. You make yourself sick longing for him; you make yourself come three times over your own fist, a habit you rarely indulge in since you usually find more pleasure in the act of denial than you do in the act of release. But there is nothing behind these white walls, no true denial or true release, just the profound, obsessive yearning for him that festers inside you. 

 

You think of him too often, stomach plummeting each time you recall the curl of his palm flattened out against your shoulder, his nails in your skin, his breath in your lungs. With his name rolling unsaid beneath your tongue and the bite of self-recrimination between your lungs, you make yourself come. You wait for him to call. 

 

Luckily, you do not have to wait long.You’re sitting at the bare desk in the dismally utilitarian room Waverly put you up in, trying in vain to write a report detailing the Honduras mission, when something buzzes. You feel the crackle inside your breast pocket before you register it as a sound, your brow screwed up as you fumble miserably with the communicator, extending its tiny, pitiful microphone. 

 

“Is this thing on?” Napoleon says, and you are flooded with dual parts relief and terror. 

 

“Cowboy,” you say, “I hear you.” 

 

Napoleon sighs, and you wince, for it is nothing but radio static and scraping on your end, a stinging buzz in your ear. “Peril,” he says, “I’m so very glad it’s you. The first time I tried this...I connected to a secretary at HQ, and she had to patch me through. The wait was agonizing.” 

 

You don’t know what that means, not really. You do, however, hate the idea of some young agent answering phones for Waverly, speaking in dulcet honey tones for Napoleon, whom she has undoubtedly seen and swooned over. You do not hate this idea more than you hate yourself for even thinking of it, bristling with wild untamed jealousy as if he is your possession. “What do you want?” you ask. 

 

“Well,” he says, sounding only slightly affronted, “I would be delighted if you would join me for dinner tonight. My cooking is surely superior to whatever Waverly is feeding you in that woefully yellow place.”

 

You are silent for a moment, imagining Napoleon in his apron, Napoleon slaving away over a cookbook, Napoleon with sweat on his brow. You are relieved there is no one around to see your smile, the one you fail to suppress. “Where is your apartment?” 

 

He gives you a time and an address. You consider telling the truth, risking the flood by asking him, _Do we need the guise of dinner, or can I come to you now? Have you touched yourself thinking about me? Do you long to see me again as desperately as I long to see you? What is happening between us, does it have a name, can you tell me?_ However, these are things you cannot make yourself say, certainly not over U.N.C.L.E.-provided communicators, perhaps not at all. 

 

The next several hours pass slowly and painfully. Gaby comes over, all dolled up, and does not tell you where she has been or where she is going, and you do not ask. She does tell you that there is no shower curtain in the bathroom that joins your rooms, but the water is at least hot. “It is not so different from East Berlin,” she says, sitting on the desk and kicking sandaled feet. “Or Moscow, I suspect. But I’m staying at the Ritz tonight, thank you very much.” She chews on her thumbnail and watches you very closely. “I’m quite sure Napoleon would offer you somewhere to sleep, if you asked.”

 

You must flush very deeply because Gaby’s inhalation is sharp and telling as she sucks it in. You stare at the ground (new unscuffed grey linoleum) and count in Russian, trying very hard not to think about the handful of times you very nearly let Gaby Teller kiss you. You weren’t exactly adverse to the idea; she was lovely then and still is. Almost impossibly charming and brash and entirely too smart to _not_ fall in love with in some way. Gaby Teller is as close to perfect as women come, everything you would have wanted if you had ever let yourself want.

 

But you did not want, not before Napoleon. You were content to stay rooted in the snow, boots frozen against the earth while Gaby sidled closer and closer. There was no need to wrench yourself up out of that layer of frost and blood to reach for her, there was no gravity pulling you into her orbit. She did not terrify you, she did not melt your resolve, she did not magnetize you. She was simply lovely and looking at you, with those big dark eyes, wet and wondering. And you simply thought that was the way attraction, even _love_ , worked before Napoleon. Thinking a woman was close to perfect and standing with your head bent, waiting for her to fit herself into your arms. 

 

You look at Gaby, her swinging feet, her pouted lower lips and doe-eyes, still so dark and wet and shining. There is a strange and quiet intimacy in the air, as if you are both waiting for the other to say something, confess to this white room, its sterile walls. 

 

“I wish I could have loved you instead,” you tell her eventually, in a voice so low and wavering. It is perhaps the rawest truth you have ever offered Gaby Teller, but you feel that you owe it to her after Rome, after the wide span of unspoken and undiscussed nothing that stretched after it. You blink and swallow a thickness in your throat. 

 

She shrugs. “I don’t. That would have been very inconvenient.” 

 

You nod, for there is nothing to stay. You swallow and swallow, and finally she hops off the desk and sighs deeply at your expense, eyes rolling. Hooking one hand in the crook of your elbow, she pats the top of your head with the other. It is a very condescending gesture, especially from someone so small, but you are grateful for her anyway, grateful to be condescended to because at least it makes Napoleon _rea_ l, that whatever is happening to you is massive enough for even Gaby, who avoids inconvenience in favor of self-preservation, to see it. 

 

“At the risk of sounding patronizing,” she says, “I want to remind you that you have to be very careful.” Her voice is cautious, her eyes downcast. You wonder if the room is bugged, as you must always wonder in your line of work, before remembering that you are at HQ, on the inside. “Because this, this isn’t just inconvenient, it’s illegal. You are lucky I am so understanding because not everyone will just sit on the sidelines, feeling exasperated. Some people would rather kill you,” Gaby adds. 

 

You scowl at her. “I am from Russia,” you remind her. “I know people who would kill me.” 

 

She cringes. “I didn’t forget. Just, be careful. Be discreet. And Solo…,” she stops because you shrug out from under her small hands, unable to sustain touch and hear Napoleon’s name at the same time. “He is not as cruel as he thinks. Obviously, you know that. But he is still a dangerous man. Like a...what do they call them. Bull in a china shop. Breaking because he’s just too big and clumsy and stupid.” 

 

You think of Napoleon shattering glass and grit your teeth, gaze still fixed on the linoleum. It is much easier to discuss something like this without actually naming it, but the fight is still agony, each word a barb in your tongue, stinging behind your eyes. “I know that, too.” 

 

She sucks in a long, noisy breath and reaches for you, prying your hand off your knee so that she can squeeze it. “You are both bulls, but you are also both china shops. It’s been the worst, stupidest thing to watch,” she says. “I almost locked you both inside that storage closet in the T.H.R.U.S.H. lab, you remember?” 

 

You chew the inside of your lip. “If it is so bad to watch, look away.” 

 

“Oh,” she says, pecking you on the cheek before smiling smugly, “I do.” She uses the backs of her fingers to wipe away the lipstick print, but even long after she leaves for the Ritz, you keep wiping, grateful for some menial task to busy yourself with, some small, safe thing you have power over, while the rest of you burns in anticipation.


	11. Chapter 11

You walk to a the farmer’s market three streets down from the corner your flat overlooks, and people stare at you as if you are a stranger in New York. And perhaps you are, now. You feel changed by the time you spent overseas, falling in love for the first time in your life otherwise spent in willful cold, taking but never giving. 

You cross streets you once knew and feel like a stranger, belonging nowhere, wrinkling your nose at wilted collard greens and the rain-wet mush in the gutters, checking your pockets like you forgot something, even though you didn’t. People stare at you, and you stare back, trying to pinpoint what has changed, if falling in love has somehow changed the way you look, the way you exist in space. Too much for this city, debris-choked and sky-scraping. You’re aware that you look out of place, but you cannot say why; nothing should be out of place in Brooklyn, a city of eccentrics. However, you suspect that your mask of indifference is ill-fitting today, that you look incomplete, fractured, _human_. 

All because you touched something you shouldn’t have touched, and now you’re covered in fresh burns, the lymph leaking through your clothes, giving you away. Maybe you look out of place because Illya and Gaby are not by your side as they have been for the last several months, making your actual home feel nothing like home at all. Maybe you look out of place because love melted your mask, and everyone is finally seeing you as the fraud you are. 

It feels terrible, but there’s a strange satisfaction in it, too. You pay for your vegetables with a handful of crumpled cash instead of your usual crisp bills, and there is a strange satisfaction in that, too. Concrete, physical evidence that you are not the same man you were last time you were in New York, that Illya dipped into you, making fists and ruining your formerly pristine existence. You can’t remember why you shoved the bills into your pocket so messily, but you suspect it was because you were distracted. Thinking of other things, of a scar shaped like a swan’s neck, rough hands and blue eyes and the way your own neck still aches from craning it up to kiss someone taller than you. 

You walk home, the home that does not feel like home. Stocking your refrigerator feels incredibly foolish, as it smells strange and chemical and unused like the rest of your apartment, which is sterile and dusty, haunted by all the things you wish you had to offer but do not. You cannot build a home when you have never lived inside one; you don’t know why you keep _thinking about it._

Peril will eat anything, so you don’t waste time or money on a recipe with subtle flavors he will miss, nuance that will not impress him. Still, the urge is there, and that bothers you. You are so well-versed in the formula of aimless, endless seduction, but you know nothing, nothing at all, of love. 

Everything feels contrived, so you dust. There is so much to be dusted, after all. You dust and dust, and you sneeze more than once, purse your lips with distaste at all the dead flies caught in the cobwebs woven into every corner, drifting and fluttering when you turn the fan on to clear the air. You cough and get your hands dirty; you think about Illya bending you over your coffee table and fucking you raw against the carpet, you think of the burns you want on your knees, the lymph that would soak through your slacks. 

But these are things you are not ready to fully think about, not when there is still so much dust, when you have onions to mince and carrots to peel. You shake your head and furrow your brow often, but still he comes creeping back into your mind, like blood staining a bandage.

Before Illya, you did not devote much time _thinking_ about whoever you were seeing in the evening. You awaited their arrival with mild excitement, the amount of anticipation one would experience prior to a delicious meal, a night at the cinema. None of this gut-wrenching desire that ebbs into pain; this is entirely new. You also rarely cleaned your apartment in any recognizable fashion before inviting over your dates, your lovers, in the past. If they commented on the dust or the staleness, you were quick to respond with a tale from your travels, _Isn’t it a shame? I would have straightened up for you, but I only just stepped off a plane. Yes, I was that eager to see you. Yes, there were so many beautiful women in Italy, Argentina, Estonia, Brazil. But would you believe it, none so lovely as you?_ Lies in an even voice, dripping charm. A formula you know by heart, one that’s useless right now. 

Vulnerability tastes so bitter in your mouth; it seems miraculous that you keep swallowing it and wanting more.

You shake your head, thinking about how _strange_ it is to have someone in your life who knows you beyond the alias, the code name, the dusty but richly furnished apartment, the plane tickets, the clubs, the whiskey, the glamour. To be inviting over a man who has crudely stitched your bullet wounds and seen you vomit from pain, who has heard the way your voice wavers when you’re honest, who has hurt you with his silences. A man who once tried to kill you, before he tore a hotel room to pieces so that he would not have to. 

It is so much history for your little flat in Brooklyn to endure, and you wonder if it will tear the walls from the floor, if the roof will come crumbling down. You think of lying in the rubble, like lying in the sand, the willing victim of a fall you knew would come. You think of the bitter taste in your mouth, and swallow and swallow. 

\---

On your way to Napoleon’s apartment, you buy a bottle of red wine. You know it's a ridiculous and superfluous thing to do, but you do it anyway, mostly because your hands feel so distractingly and terribly empty that you don’t think you can survive the taxi ride if you don’t have something to occupy them with. Still, you feel absurd standing in the lobby of Napoleon’s apartment building after someone buzzes you in, so very misplaced amid the elegant mid-century architecture, boots scuffing along the black-and-white checkered tile as you wait for the elevator, holding that bottle of wine. 

Your stomach is in knots, and you cannot ever remember feeling so _young_. Not even as a boy in Russia, swallowing tears when your father went to the gulag and your mother fell to her knees on the kitchen floor. Fingers tapping rhythmlessly on the neck of the wine bottle, you try to keep your mind blank as you walk down the carpeted hallway to Napoleon’s flat. After all, there are too many bullet holes and pockmarks to fall into, and you can only endure so many paralyzing waves of nausea. 

Still, your hands are sweating as you knock on his door, number 512, your own reflection distorted in the engraved brass plaque. You hear rustling and footsteps inside, the door swings open, and there is Napoleon, looking very tired still but also very clean, eyes bright, a slate-grey waistcoat over a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. You blink at him, like he’s not real, like you haven’t seen him in _years_ , even though it has only been one and a half days.

There are the marks on his throat, the rich purple of them faded into a dusky yellow-brown, and they make your mouth dry to think about, they make your heart contract magnificently around the memory of his stubble under your tongue. 

“Peril,” he says, cocking his head. “Please come in.” 

You do, and everything feels as if it is happening in slow motion. You register art on the walls, a modern couch and an antique coffee table, and the smell of something delicious cooking, something with herbs, with tomatoes. All of that seems grey, though, while Napoleon is in color, the only solid thing in this room. 

“You brought wine,” he says, staring at your hand clenched so tightly around the neck of the bottle that you’re in danger of crushing it, shattering glass and staining Napoleon’s kitchen towels red. He takes the bottle from your white-knuckled grip, peering at the label with a furrowed brow before he sets it down on the counter. “Good stuff, too. You didn’t have to, though, I am more than equipped, and I don’t need any more reasons to find you infuriatingly charming and clueless, but--”

Something inside you short-circuits, and you lose your mind. You grab him by his marked-up neck and back him up against the wall by the stove, so fast and hard his breath huffs out of him, and you _feel_ it snag in his throat, the slightest tremor beneath the dig of your thumb before you kiss him. 

It feels like fucking his mouth more than it feels like a kiss, teeth in his lower lip and tongue twisting madly in alongside his as he groans into you, hands fisted in the front of your sweater. He melts against you, and you sob into the kiss because this, this, this is all you want, all you have been wanting since you learned how to want. 

Nothing is enough, and you’re desperate for the taste of his spit, the heat and the terror of it, so much so that you cannot even remember how to be tender; you want his skin, so you grab his shirt and untuck it from his waistband, slide two hungry hands up onto his waist, his ribcage. He shudders under your palms, feeling breakable, and you want that, too, want to break him, want him broken. 

You both need air, so you part, panting, foreheads pressed together so hard it hurts. “Did you miss me?” he says quietly. 

You don’t know what to say, because missing him seems too small to encompass the magnitude of what you have been feeling, the nausea and the anxiety and the hunger. You nod instead, tilting into the palm he spreads over your pulse. You can smell garlic and basil on his hand, and it is so perfect that your eyes flutter closed; he is so perfect that you cannot stand to look at him. 

“I was cooking for you,” he says. “Are you even hungry? It can wait. Tell me what you want.” 

You kiss him again, lick his mouth open, suck on his tongue until he’s grinding solidly into your thigh. You can feel the heat of his cock, hard for you already and you want to drop to your knees, you want to mouth over the thick line of him through his slacks, you are swallowing spit as you remember the perfect musky taste of his skin. There are so many things you want, and watching him cook is perhaps on that list, but not very close to the top of it. 

“I want you,” you tell him, voice rough and broken as you thumb up the slats of his ribs, which are damp with new sweat. “Any way I can have you.” 

He inhales sharply, letting go of you for a minute so that he can reach behind himself and fumble with the burners on the stove, turning them off. “Okay,” he says, voice hoarse. “Okay.” 

Together, you stumble into his bedroom; he leads the way because there has been no grand tour, no formal introduction to his apartment, only his breath and his skin, both of which you cannot see past. You only stop kissing him so that you can toe off your shoes and pull your sweater over your head. You’re burning up inside of it, the rapid-fire thud of your heart making you hot and fevered, skin damp as it touches the air. Napoleon makes a small noise as you struggle out of your clothes, unbuttoning his own shirt with deft fingers as he stares at you. “You’re so lovely,” he murmurs as you pull your belt free from its loops. “I haven’t been able to think of anything else.” 

In seconds, you’re upon him again, crushing those terrible, gut-wrenching words with your mouth, fiercely silencing him because his voice is unendurably low and shuddering, like catgut under the slice of a bow. You love the way he fits into your hands, hard rippling muscle and skin sticky with sweat, and it’s so _easy_ for you to push him down onto his back, so easy to climb atop the broad expanse of him and fix your mouth over those fading bruises. 

His voice rumbles under your lips, ragged groans and a bastardized version of your name, drunkenly slurred into a single syllable as you suck fervently at his skin. You’re desperate for the salt and spice of him, you’re desperate for his cock in your hand, filling your mouth. There are so many things you want that your touch is graceless and hungry, moving from his bare, heaving chest to his abdominals to his ass to his thighs, all the tempered power there as he flexes and rubs against you. “I want...,” you murmur brokenly into the wild tattoo of his pulse, trying in vain to get your hand between your shifting, grinding bodies. “I want,” you repeat, as if you hold a single desire and not a lifetime of them.

“Illyusha,” he whispers into your ear amid a ruin of strangled breath, the filthy echo of what he once called you in Cologne. “Whatever it is, you can have it.” 

And you feel your heart tighten defensively, your stomach bottom out because what if it’s more than just this? What if it is not Napoleon Solo spread out under you atop his own Egyptian sheets, in his own New York apartment, but Napoleon Solo spread out under you always? Those sheets making imprints in your skin as you wake up here beside him, not just tomorrow morning but every morning after that? Your breath comes to a wrecked, shuddering stop, and you bury your face deep into his neck, inhaling from him because it is too much, you know it, and it’s only a matter of time before he finds this all out about you. “Can I?” you ask anyway, rubbing your face down his sternum and between the firm swell of his pectoral muscles, scouring your face on dark, coarse hair. 

As if he has never entertained the possibility that you might want something reckless and foolish and sea-wide, he cards a hand roughly through the back of your hair and answers with certainty, “Yes.” 

\---

Illya’s crying over your heart, and it’s the most beautiful thing. He keeps rubbing his cheek against you, right where your ribcage imperfectly protects the wild thud that proves you’re alive, proves you’re afraid. He wipes hot, salt-sticky tears into you, wet clumping his lashes together and shining in the fractured beam of light filtering in from your kitchen. And really, it’s the most beautiful thing, that stricken blue rimmed in red. 

For the first time since this mess began, you wonder if Illya Kuryakin is in love with you. If his maddening stretches of silence and the taste of paralyzing terror on his breath are all because he, like you, stumbled unexpectedly into the riptide and got torn beneath a pummel of things he never expected could take him, touch him. You wonder if you have been wrong about him all these months hurtling you toward this moment here, with you on your back and him on top of you. 

You tangle your fingers into his hair, smoothing it down before you ruck it deliberately back up again. You are so hard under the crushing weight of him that you’re breathless, you’re blind. And you wonder what he would do if you asked him, made a fist in that hair and tilted his flushed, tear-slick face toward your own and begged, _Illya, for the love of God, please tell me what exactly it is that you want. There is nothing I would not give you, just tell me._

You want him exactly as he is, though, clumsily groping your flesh and breathing from you like you’re air. You cannot do anything that might risk this, so you say nothing. Just touch what you can reach of him with trembling hands and arch up under the perfect heat of his mouth as he sucks mouthfuls of your flesh past his teeth and bites down so hard your vision whites out. Just lie there while he unbuttons your slacks and pulls them down over your thighs, eyes fixed with a sick sort of hunger to your cock, licking his lips as he thumbs gently over the vein on the underside. 

It becomes impossible to catalogue what he does to you, for it all bleeds together into a nervy swell of sensation, pleasure so deep and invasive it edges into pain and back again. You writhe mindlessly under his teeth and his nails, under all the pressure and power stored in his murderous body as he touches you with vast, mauling palms. It’s inexperienced touch, graceless and fervent, and you love the way it keeps crashing over your head like the tide. You struggle to breathe and just let him, let him explore, let him take. It is all at once too much and not enough; you’re throbbing and so hard it aches, but his touch will only linger over your cock momentarily before moving elsewhere because he is so impatient, he is so greedy. 

It seems absurd to think of Illya as a greedy man, so you laugh breathlessly, head falling back and rolling against the sheets, stars in your eyes as your lungs struggle to fill with air. Illya freezes and says, “What,” with no question mark like he is not used to laughter during sex, like he is not used to laughter, or sex, at all. 

And for once in your life, you don’t know what to say. You’re so used to following a script, but it’s all wrong for this; you’re so used to taking charge during sex because it’s something you’re good at, something you could do in your sleep. But here you are, flat on your back, trying to remember how to breathe, how to do anything save for clutching desperately for his shoulders. 

He shifts up your chest and looks down at you, eyes all pupil and overflowing wet, his thumb at the corner of your mouth, tugging it open. “This is not a joke for me,” he repeats, and you can feel his heart beating, the wild rage of it so close to your own, imperfectly protected, and again, you wonder, _Are you in love with me? Is that what you think is too much? Are you the romantic you once denied being?_

You slide a palm up his smooth chest, and it seems so simply, stupidly, foolishly cosmic that your hand fits so neatly there, over the frantic thrum of his heartbeat. “I’m sorry,” you murmur, thumbing over his nipple. “It was an awed sort of laugh; I’m having a difficult time believing all of this. You’re unbelievable.” 

He must be satisfied by this answer because the tail end of your last word gets crushed and spread out into nothingness under his tongue as he ducks down to kiss you, so hard and so deep. You let him rip sounds from your throat, let him touch you like you are the first real thing he has ever touched. You let him kiss you and grind into the splay of your thighs, you let him roll you onto your stomach and count your vertebrae with his tongue. You let him take and take, muffling each awed laugh with fistfuls of sheets. 

\---


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More of this!

You don’t even know what you’re doing. You have no north star, no constellation as you map his body in kisses; you just want to taste him because you love the way he tastes, you want every inch of him shining with your spit because it looks best that way. He is supposed to be spread out like this for you, he should be yours.

Your breath shudders out of you in a series of crushed, overwhelmed sobs, and your eyes will not stop leaking. You bury your face in the deep curve of Napoleon’s lower back, and before you consider what it means, you’re licking your way lower, down into the damp, humid cleft of his ass, breathing him in. 

He makes the most glorious sound, a lost, tattered wail as you hold him apart and dip your tongue into him where he’s dark and tight and musky and bitter and perfect. You echo him, moaning against the twitching rim of muscle as he opens up for you, and this is the filthiest thing you have ever done, the best and most stomach-twisting, and you could drown, you want to. 

“Illya,” he grinds out, arching his back and pushing himself up against your tongue, suffocating you. And then you cannot hear anything else he says because you’re deaf, the blood pounds in your ears, and you’re lost to this storm, licking him open and fucking up inside him, gripping bruise-deep into his thighs so you can hold him split like this. 

You fuck him this way for a long time. Until your chin is slick with your own spit, and he’s reduced to mindless writhing whimpers. Until your jaw aches, and you’ve been grinding down into the edge of the bed so long you’re close to coming. “Illya,” he finally says, loud enough that you can hear him, your cheek resting momentarily against the curve of his ass while you thumb over his hole, where he’s pink and wet and glistening. “Illya,” he says again, reaching behind himself to cuff you clumsily at the back of your neck. “Fuck me,” he says then, pulling your hair. “Need you to fuck me so bad.” 

You have to stop moving so you won’t come against his sheets, inside your pants, which you haven’t managed to get off all the way yet. You struggle out of them, fumbling with the zipper using one hand, the other spread wide and certain over the small of Napoleon’s back, across that lovely, sweat-slick dip.

He looks over his shoulder at you, eyes half-lidded and hazy, two vivid spots of darkness on his cheeks. “God,” he murmurs, reaching for your cock with his teeth in his lower lip. “You are so fucking wet. Dripping for me,” he pushes his fingers through the slick mess of precum beaded at the tip, and you both gasp, your cock twitching under his thumb. “So fucking beautiful.” 

You don’t even need anything to further lubricate him: he’s soft and pliant from your tongue, and your cock is dripping, leaking out onto his hole as you nudge up against him. And he is the tightest thing you’ve ever pushed up inside, _impossibly_ tight and fire-hot, and so, so fucking beautiful as he takes you, mouth hanging open and eyes screwed shut. “That’s so good,” he mumbles against his forearm after you bottom out, one palm flat on the mattress, the other rubbing his back between his shoulderblades. “So good, Illya.” 

You’re pulsing already, unable to move without spilling into the terrible, dirty clench of his insides. Sweat drips from your brow and onto the back of his neck as you bend over his prone body, trying to catch your breath, trying to hold on. After a moment of careful stillness, you brace your hands on either side of him and withdraw a few inches, groaning at the perfect slow drag of him all around you. 

“Jesus,” he sighs into the mattress, pushing his hips into yours. You watch his knuckles, so white as he holds onto the sheets, whiter as you push back into him, and he cries out. You never find a rhythm; he feels too good, you’re both shaking, and you have to keep stopping because you can’t last, even if you want to. 

You’re stunned by the way he takes it, so beautiful with his back arched and the muscles in his ass rippling each time you thrust, his cheeks flushed as you grind him hard into the mattress beneath your body. He takes you and takes you; the simplest, deepest, hottest thing you’ve ever sunken into, and you’re so close, all it takes is his body’s natural, reflexive clench around your length to push you over the edge. You come in a mess of wild, graceless jerks of your hips, mouth open and drooling onto his back as you fill him so full that the searing heat of it spills over. 

He cries out as you come, a wordless sob into the sheets, and then he is all spasm and tremble, twisting his arm up and reaching for you so he can slide tremulous fingers into your sweat-damp hair. There, he makes a fist. “Don’t pull out,” he says hoarsely, voice strangled under your weight. “Want you to stay inside of me.” 

You lie heaving on top of him, so floored and ruined by your orgasm that all you can do is nod, stubble scraping against his back, heart thundering. You don’t mean for them to, of course, but the tears spring back to your eyes, riding a wave of aimless, confused overwhelm. You swallow thickly and open your mouth against his scapula. “Did I hurt you?” you eventually ask, thinking that such a thing must _hurt_ , to be split like that. 

Napoleon makes a noise somewhere between a moan and a laugh, and it rumbles up through your body. “Yes,” he says gravely, “but only in the best of ways.” Then, after a moment of idly curling his fingers through your hair, he adds, “Everything about that was perfect, and I may never recover.” 

_I don’t want you to ever recover from me,_ you think, but cannot even begin to say, not with your stinging eyes and thick throat. _You are supposed to be spread out like this for me; you should be mine._

“Okay,” he says then, a line through his brow and his eyes shut tight. “You can move.”

You force the rising tide of sensation away, fighting hard to silence yourself as you push up on wavering arms, peeling your chest from his spine with a choked, stifled sound. 

He winces as you pull out in a slick of your own come, filthy and still hot. Then he rolls onto his back within the cage of your braced arms, and the first thing you notice is that he has come, too. A slick of pearlescent white clings to his pubic hair and the dark trail beneath his navel, and you realize there must be a wet spot on the sheets, too, from him rubbing himself to finish against the bed while you fucked him raw and hollow, and you instantly want to find it with your lips, you want to suck it out of the cotton. 

Your breath catches in your throat at the sight of him, and before he can wipe himself clean, you’re doing it for him, head bent as you lick it all away. So salty and bitter and burning on your tongue, making the kiss-chapped corners of your mouth tingle as you suck his come out of his stomach hair. 

He lies limp and panting under you, abdominals shuddering under the broad sweep of your tongue. “Jesus Christ, Illya,” he hisses like he can’t believe you’re doing this to him, like he cannot believe the base, primal thing he reduces you to. And why should he, when he is as used to seduction as he is to chess games and art? Why should he, when you are nothing but a blunt instrument hewn to kill, who has never used his mouth like this, not once not ever?

You lick down to his spent cock, sliding your lips over his length gently, groaning as it twitches against your chin. He is so perfect like this, vulnerable while you take and take and take, his hands in your hair and his nails against your scalp, his thighs on either side of your shoulders, forever in tremor. 

_You are supposed to be spread out like this for me_ , you think with him soft and keening between your lips. _You should be mine_.

\---

You pull Illya up into a kiss, and he tastes like your come, like your ass. Every part of you, your blood and your pain and your vulnerability, the lymph that has been seeping from your wounds ever since he first touched you. You groan up into his mouth, brow furrowed deeply as he licks your teeth, sucks on your tongue before letting you go and collapsing into a mess of limbs and labored breath beside you. You feel hollowed out, empty now that he’s not inside you anymore, the thick-hot burn of him stretching you wide, so you find his hand in the dark and bring it between your thighs. 

His fingers brush up against your used hole, and he hums, gasping at how easy it is for him to push up inside you where you’re still slicked open with his come, swollen and raw. He feels you experimentally, and you grit your teeth against the nervy overwhelm of it, the stinging width of his knuckles as he twists another finger up alongside the first. “Feel what you did to me,” you whisper against his temple before lapping away the salt that has collected there at his hairline. “Feel what you’ve done.” 

He touches you for a long time with slow, reverent, aimless strokes, lazily fucking you if only for the pleasure of feeling your insides painted in his come. He buries his lips in your hair, teeth grazing the shell of your ear as he confesses, “I want to lick you again. But it’s not clean, no?” 

You laugh, and it turns into a cough because he is _unbelievable_ , truly unbelievable. “No, I can’t imagine that would be very sanitary,” you tell him. “But I appreciate your dedication to the cause.” 

His fingers slide from you, but he keeps them nudged up against your hole, teasing the wrecked rim of muscle. “It’s hard to stop,” he says after a moment. It is the most he’s said about this since your hotel room in Honduras, his scared eyes in that grey light. 

“You don’t have to stop,” you tell him. “Just don’t poison yourself.” 

He nods, brow brushing down your cheek, and it all feels so miraculous, so surreal. That you are lying in a ruin on your own bed, Illya Kuryakin curled around you, fingers almost inside of you, tongue at your pulse. It is not where you imagined you would end up, when you met Illya and he tried to kill you, tried to stop your car with his hands. It is not where you imagined you would end up, when you realized there was no limit to what you wanted from him. You never considered that there might be no limit to what he wanted from you. 

You hiss as he moves his sticky hand up to cup your cock, so much sensation, too much to take, and you writhe away from him, canting your hips up off the bed. He follows you, fingers digging into the cup created by your hipbone and oblique as he drags you back down to him. So certain of where he wants you, now that he has you. It’s fucking _remarkable_ , how certain he seems. 

He keeps his hand on your stomach, and you can feel yourself twitching in this vague, empty way now that his fingers are gone. Perhaps he is giving you time to recover. Perhaps you will never recover. 

There you lie, one of his legs thrown over your thigh, the stretch of his ribcage pressed up against yours so that your hearts can beat closely together. You try to catch your breath, but you worry you’ve lost it permanently. That he’s sucked it out of your lungs, and you will never be able to inhale without him again. You rub your face with your open palm, somewhat stunned by this whole thing. 

“Are you hungry?” you finally ask him after a moment of uselessly labored breath. “I can’t guarantee my cooking will be as impressive as it usually is, given I had to stop halfway through and everything is just sitting out there getting cold.”

“I am not picky,” he mumbles. 

You work on rolling away from the warmth of his body and standing, dizzy and wrung out as you shrug on your robe. You cannot stop looking at Illya, so much pale skin, naked and flushed on your bed. _Your_ bed. You shake your head, and he furrows his brow at you. “What are you thinking?” he asks.

You offer a hand and after a moment or two of consideration, he takes it. Rough fingers brush up against the thrum of your pulse, so real and so good that you feel your mouth twitching around a reflexive smile. You help pull him to his feet, working as a counterbalance, which proves elusive as you are both wobbling, both unstable. “I’m thinking that you look impossibly good on my sheets,” you tell him after letting go of his hand, sticky with his own come, hot from your body. 

You turn away from him while he tugs on his slacks, tightening the sash of your robe as you walk into the kitchen, which still smells like puttanesca and sautéed onions. “Why impossible?” he asks from behind you, voice nothing but a gruff scrape of darkness and, really, this will kill you, the terrible depth of feeling he stirs up between your lungs.

You don’t answer because you don’t want to think about the inevitable, you don’t want to think about how this is temporary. “I was making polenta and mushrooms, which is, quite honestly, a terrible meal to accompany that wine you brought. I’m wondering if I could salvage it into something else,” is what you choose to say instead, eyes fixed on the stove as you take the top off the nearest saucepan and peer inside. You click your tongue, wondering what on earth Illya is doing standing silently in the hallway until you feel the heat and breadth of him looming behind you, so close, close enough to touch if you lean back, but then he _is_ touching you. Burying his face in your neck and pressing his chest into your back, wrapping an arm around your waist to draw you up against him. 

You stop doing everything, even breathing. You just stand there with your hand white-knuckled around a wooden spoon while he brushes his lips up to your ear. “I am sorry,” he says, sliding a hand into your robe so that he can touch skin. “I am sorry I won’t let you finish anything.” 

You let yourself tilt into him, let your eyes slide closed. It feels good, for just this moment, to pretend this is something that can happen. Illya Kuryakin holding you from behind in your kitchen, your knees weak from sex while you cook him things, drinking a glass of some poorly chosen cabernet. A plausible life for a different man but not for you. Not for him. 

His throat bobs against your own as he swallows, and you say, “Please don’t apologize for that.” You allow your head to fall back onto his shoulder. “I have my priorities in order.” _Don’t let me finish anything ever again,_ you want to tell him. _Feel what you’ve done_. A plausible thing to say for a different man but not for you. Not to him. 

He inhales sharply against your pulse, wet ragged breath and the sharp line of his teeth pressed into you, his hand flexing over your abdominals. “I don’t…,” he starts, then stops, swallowing thickly. “I feel like I can’t do anything else.” 

“You don’t have to,” you say then, meaning it. Still, you’re surprised when he grabs you by the shoulder and spins you around; you drop the spoon with a clatter before he’s pressing you up against the kitchen wall again, your chin gripped tight between his fingers. 

His kisses you deep and hot and filthy, body surging against yours, a thick thigh rending your own apart. “Napoleon,” he breathes against your lips, pulling your hair, eyes hazy and pupil-black. He thumbs into your mouth, and you suck on him instinctually, arms around his neck so he doesn’t knock you down with the force of his want. _What?_ you think wildly. _What, what? What do you want? Whatever it is you have it already, you have it, you have it._

“Napoleon,” he repeats, and you were _right_ , all those months ago in Singapore, when he said your name so carefully, so deliberately. It sounds so very lovely in his voice. 

\---


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who is still reading this story and leaving lovely comments. It really helps motivate me to keep updating. Not much more left, we're nearing the end!

There is a faint panic growing somewhere inside you, a fear that if you _stop_ kissing Napoleon, stop taking everything you want from him the very moment you want it, you will stop being able to. He’ll disappear, leaving you alone here in his apartment, one of his stolen paintings gathering dust. 

So you kiss him and kiss him, his body hot and hard and trapped between you and the wall, a living breathing thing that gasps and flinches when you grind his spine to dust against the windowsill. You love how he pushes back up against you, forever meeting you halfway, biting your lips, riding the swells of your storm. His robe comes apart, and you fit yourself up against his torso, his heaving chest pressed to yours, ribs slatting together. You can hear his heart pounding; you imagine reaching inside his body and holding it tight in one of your fists. 

He grabs at your hair and twists your head down onto his shoulder so he can look at you, wide-bright eyes and mouth an obscene thing, so pink and bitten. “Peril,” he says breathlessly. “As much as I enjoy this, you _can_ slow down. I’m in no hurry to get rid of you. If you want to spend the whole night profaning every surface of my apartment, we certainly can, but if you’d rather spend all of tomorrow doing the same, we can do that, too.” 

You blink at him, lips parted and yearning as you watch the cords in his throat work while he swallows. Hands flexing where they’re fixed on his waist, you make yourself answer, “You don’t mind if I stay?” 

“God,” he says, head falling back and thudding against the wall. You kiss the flicker of sweat there, glistening over his pulse, breathing him in. “I _want_ you to stay. I’m telling you I _want_ that.” 

You start shaking against him, a tremor of terrible relief as you consider what it means that Napoleon _wants_ you to stay in his apartment. You stand upright and regard him, thumbing over his jaw, the cut of his cheekbones, the cleft of his chin. “I will, then,” you answer, bending to kiss his lips, closed-mouth and gentle. Just a solitary, tender press of your mouths together, and you have not kissed him like this before; you’re not sure if you’ve ever kissed anyone like this. It feels strange and wonderful and somehow dangerous, to allow softness between you, when neither of you should be capable of such a thing. 

He cups your face after you pull away, brow furrowed and eyes glinting. “I never expected any of this,” he tells you, a curious rawness to his voice. “Forgive me if I keep acting shocked. I still half-expect you to realize what you’re doing and punch me mid-kiss. Just knock me out and turn me into the CIA for suspected homosexual tendencies.”

You let go of him, watch him pick the formerly forgotten spoon up off the counter and flick on a few burners, lips pursed. “I don’t need to realize what I’m doing,” you explain, eyes trained on the back of his neck, where there are marks from your nails you don’t remember putting there. “I know what I’m doing.” 

He looks over his shoulder at you, lips quirking up into the slightest of smiles. It makes your heart jump; for someone who makes a joke out of nearly everything, Napoleon Solo rarely smiles. “That,” he says, pushing something off a cutting board and into the saucepan with the edge of his knife, “is what’s so remarkable.” 

Napoleon gives you a corkscrew to open the wine. You pour two glasses and watch him cook for you, barefoot and in his robe, hair mussed up in the back from being worried by your hands. It feels like a crime, to get away with staring at him so unabashedly, Napoleon flushed from sex, humming to himself and occasionally turning to you and smiling in that wild, animal way, so subtle and reflexive it is more of a muscle twitch than a smile, but you know, you know what it is. 

You cannot help but return it. You cannot help but step into his space and bracket him in your arms and against the counter, and kiss the turned-up corner of his mouth. Closed-mouth and gentle, a softness between you, when neither of you should be capable of such a thing.

 

\---

It’s too late to eat at the table. It seems like such a contrived, pointless thing to waste time on when Illya has already fucked you, already turned you inside out, already stripped you of so much propriety. Instead, you sit side by side on your loveseat, plates in your laps and bare feet kicked up on the coffee table while Nancy Sinatra sings in the background.

It is very strange, the sight of him shirtless here in your apartment, this die-cut marble man with his white shoulders chipped in scar tissue, spots of color on his cheeks like you pressed wine thumbprints into him. He is too huge for a Brooklyn flat, really. But there he is anyway, real and impossible, bent like a comma while he chews his food. 

“You’re quite lovely,” you tell him in a measured voice, sipping your wine. 

His gaze flashes to you, eyebrows arched. You love the way one is bisected so neatly by that scar, an interruption in the otherwise perfect symmetry of his face. His lips flatten out as he swallows, and then he says, “Lovely is what you call a woman.” 

“No,” you respond, “lovely is what you call any truly lovely thing. It’s an understatement, really, but if I use a word like sublime, it might go to your head. I can’t risk letting a Russian get too full of himself. You’re already teetering on the precipice of alarming self-importance.” 

There is a flicker of a smile followed by a narrowing of his eyes, and all of it settles so warmly in your gut. Fleeting vulnerabilities you feel blessed to witness, and what a novelty it is to feel _blessed_ , of all the uncanny things. 

“Hmmm,” he says. “Funny how you, American man who spends pocket money at the _salon_ , can accuse a Soviet of vanity.” 

“Not vanity,” you remind him. “Vanity and self-importance are entirely different beasts.” 

He’s quiet for a moment, thoughtful. Then, with his eyes downcast and twinkling and his cheeks a shade darker, even though he is not looking at you, he says, “It is you,” with each word short and clipped and hard-edged like a weapon. “The truly lovely thing.” 

You flatten your palm out on the loveseat where it had been resting loosely on the upholstery between your thigh and Illya’s. He has you dry-mouthed and stunned and silent, stomach knotted in heat, in discomfort, fondness. You’re not used to this. You’re not used to feeling _anything_ , save for complacent amusement when a lover compliments you on your looks; flattery is merely a con artist’s trick, and you view it as such whether or not you are on the receiving end. Therefore, such a thing coming from _Illya_ is incomprehensible. You inch your hand across the loveseat so that your fingers brush up alongside his slacks. “Am I, now?” you ask him, without really expecting an answer. 

“Yes,” he answers quite certainly. He doesn’t even pause to fake consider it as you would in his position, and such scrubbed-raw honesty shocks you, ice water rolling down your back, and you tense again, swallowing the sudden thickness in your throat. Illya Kuryakin keeps surprising you, over and over, and you wonder if you will ever get your bearings back, or if this is what it’s like to be in love, always drifting, never quite afloat in the squall. 

The record ends, and neither of you gets up to flip it over. You sit side by side in relative silence, and you cut your gaze to Illya to see if it worries him to leave such a confession hanging in the air like that between you, or if he has resigned himself to this just as you have.

As always, he is very hard to read, so your eyes fall back to less vexing things. _To think, you ended up here given the choice between me and Berlin’s prettiest mechanic_ , you consider saying, but in that moment he covers your hand with his own, pressing it into the cushion, all callous and heat against your skin. Your heart jolts into your throat, and you sit there for a moment, astounded, while he thumbs over your knuckles. 

Then, after a heartbeat or two, you shake him off, and stand to flip the record. Even after all you have already done together, holding hands seems like too much, too fast. You’re not sure why, but you suspect it has something to do with deserts, sunsets, and sand in your teeth. Perhaps you were prepared to sprawl broken-limbed on the cracked earth but not to keep the reins in your hands, not to stay in the saddle. You’re not sure you know how to ride. Perhaps you only understand falling. 

You can feel his eyes resting on your back, crawling up your spine and lingering, and you shiver although you are not cold. Nancy begins to sing again, and you sigh deeply, turning on your heel to regard him, the stilted splay of his shoulders, not quite relaxed but a far cry from their usual military straightness. “How was dinner?” you ask, noting the scraped-clean plate. 

“I am not picky,” he answers, shrugging as he repeats himself. He’s staring at you, eyes parched as if you are water, and really, it is so _different_ , to be desired like this, stinging and unguarded and pure when you are so used to everything being a game. 

“Do you want to go back to bed?” you venture, raising your eyebrows. There is nothing else to say, really, not with his pupils so dark and his fingers tapping anxiously against his thigh, the same fingers he had only just half-twined with your own. His hand stills and something in his face softens. 

“Yes,” he says, again, quite certainly. 

This time, he leads, and you follow. 

\---

You spend the whole night drowning in Napoleon Solo and fall asleep pressed against him sometime after sunrise while the Manhattan-bound traffic bustles just outside his bedroom window, muted enough you can almost mistake it for the roar of some faraway tide. You sleep far later than you have ever slept before and awake dangerously close to noon. 

He keeps you in bed half the day. It is, without a doubt, the most indulgent and grotesquely American thing you have ever done, but you cannot bring yourself to care even in a remote, theoretical fashion. He feels too good, and the glory of it all spreads so wide that there is no room at all for regret or shame. You are, for the first time in your life, thrilled to luxuriate in excess, in the rich pleasure of spending an entire lazy, rain-grey afternoon indulging yourself. Indulging Napoleon Solo, which somehow feels like the same thing. 

You spend a great deal of this time studying his scars, which is something you have at least subconsciously wanted from him for the duration of your partnership. It feels like a terrible relief to admit it now, sitting amid rumpled sheets between his bent, bare thighs, tracing over whorls of marbled tissue, learning all his notches and indentations and bullet holes. You wanted this; you wanted to see the chinks in his armor, the faultlines, the flaws. You wanted to create new ones if he didn’t allow you these indulgences, and it seems miraculous, now, that you didn’t understand what that meant for you both. What a grand and terrible thing that was to desire of him. 

He lets you discover, or rediscover, them all. Many you remember from when they were fresh, the horror and beauty of his blood spattered against pale flesh, but there are exceptions, scars that predate you. Parts of him you don’t recognize, pain you were not there to witness, and you want to know all of it, every wound and every bruise and every story behind them; you want to memorize the whole of his history. 

Rain is still falling outside, a constant din beneath the occasional rumble of thunder. “How did this happen?” you murmur, cheek pressed into his knee while you rub your fingertip over a jagged knife scar on his ribs, touch trembling over the smooth, shiny ridge of white. 

He lies there beneath you, hair a wreck of darkness against his pillow and a nearly unbearable fondness in his eyes. “That one?” he asks, twisting to peer at it, the skin bunching under your fingers. “That’s an ugly one.” 

You nod. Many of his injuries healed better than your own, even if they were objectively deeper wounds. He clearly has more invested in his appearance and has dedicated more time and effort to the healing process, where you often slap a bandage on and hope for the best, reopening wounds because you could not be bothered by them enough to risk a mission. Most of Napoleon’s scars appear to be have been stitched and tended to by a medical professional, but this one on his ribs is very clearly not, whorled and purple and twisted beneath your fingers. “It’s older,” you muse. 

“It is. From the war, friendly fire, of a sort.” 

“From a friend?” you ask. 

“Not a friend, but an American. A bunker mate of mine; he stabbed me in the ribs with a broken whiskey bottle because he didn’t like what I got up to at night. Luckily, he was terrifically drunk and not a very smart fellow sober, so he missed all the fatal arteries, missed my heart, which he was likely going for. Cheap shot in the dark, while I was sleeping,” he explains, eyebrows arched. 

You flatten your palm over the still-beating heart in question, fingers skirting up through his chest hair. You hate the idea of some young soldier trying to stab a still younger Napoleon in his sleep. You imagine a more vulnerable and earnest version of him, fighting Nazis to save a country he hadn’t yet learned to hate, tucked into a bedroll while a faceless figure loomed over him, fire on his breath and glass in his hand. One of many things that hardened him into the crystalline thing he is today. “What did you get up to at night?” you ask after a moment, even though you are mostly certain you know what it is when Napoleon alludes to the war with that pointed twist to his smile. Still, you want to hear him say it. He is the first man you have ever touched in this way, but you know in your gut that it is not the same for him. You are absurdly, unfairly jealous, as jealous as you are perversely fascinated, a convoluted bolus of knots heated and sunken in your stomach. 

He raises an eyebrow. “Surely, you know. Mostly rushed handjobs on lonely nights, missing the girls back home and wondering if we’d die tomorrow.” 

The words hang stark and cold in the air between you, tugging at that knot inside you, sinking beneath your skin like nettles. Your palm spreads over his ribs, fingers slatting so neatly into the indents. “Is it always like this, for you?” you ask him. You do not want your voice to sound troubled, but it does, and you can feel the worried lines gathering on your forehead, even as you try to slacken your face. 

“Like what?” he asks, reaching for you, thumbing between your brows gently, smoothing the crease there. 

You don’t know what to say. There aren’t words to encapsulate it, and even if there were, you don’t trust yourself to say them. Vast, terrifying, life-altering,your mind supplies as you press your lips together into a frustrated white line. World-ending. Instead, you gesture in the space between you, the empty air above his prone, ruined body. “Like this,” you repeat. 

He grabs you by your hair, making a loose fist in it and pulling you on top of him, mouth open on your shoulder before it skates up to your ear. He swallows, a click in his throat, before he murmurs, “No,” breath damp and so warm against your temple. “It’s not.” 

You turn your head, kiss him. Vast, terrifying, you think. Life-altering, world-ending. There is a spreading relief in your chest, extending radially from the knowledge that you are at least equally inexperienced at something.


End file.
